How Big should your farm get?

Of course, the more land you have to plant on, the more money you'll make by harvesting your crops. This doesn't mean you can keep expanding your farm indefinitely though. Plowing and planting aren't free. You'll just be wasting time and money if you plow a bunch of fields and then can't afford to buy any seeds to plant in them. Therefore, you want to expand a little bit at a time so that you're able to fully take advantage of all of your available acreage.

The best way to maximize your growth and planning potential at first is to clear 10 more patches of land. Once you harvest the crops that were ready and waiting for you, you'll have just enough money to clear that land and plant on it. This way, you'll have more land to grow crops on, and you'll be able to plant on all of it right away.

You can, of course, clear more land right away. If you do that though, you won't have enough money left to plant any crops and a lot of the land will just sit empty. You also won't be able to plant on as may clear parcels of land as you would have if you didn't clear so many to begin with. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, if you want to get a big farm going fast, you have to take it slow.

Harvesting Time

One of the many factors to take into account when deciding what to plant is how long you will have to wait to harvest it. Strawberries, for example, will be ready to harvest 4 hours after you plant them. If you don't get back to harvest them within 8 hours though, they'll wilt and you won't be able to make any money off of them.

You want to make sure you're not going to be planting a bunch of crops that will wilt before you can harvest them. For instance, eggplants take 2 days to grow, so you may want to consider planting these instead of strawberries if you're not going to be checking on your farm for a while. That way, you get the best use out of your land and you get a bigger payoff at the end of the growing cycle. Crops that take longer to grow also generally sell for more coins at harvest time.

Experience

Another factor that will contribute to your planting decision is that different crops yield different benefits in terms of experience. Crops that take at least a day to grow will grant you 2 experience points for each patch of land you plant them on. Most crops take at least this long to grow to maturity, but there are some, like strawberries, that only take a few hours. These will only get you one experience point per plot of land planted. The faster you accumulate experience points, the faster you'll move up to the next level.

That doesn't mean you want to only plant the crops that give you 2 experience points though. If you're going to be able to check back on your strawberries and plant more as soon as the old ones are ready to be harvested, you can actually get more experience points in a day with these types of crops. It all depends on how well you stay on top of your planting and harvesting cycles.

Investment Return

Another factor to consider when you're deciding what to plant will be the relationship between the cost of the seeds and the price you get for your goods when you harvest them. In this context, soybeans are the best of the crops you have available to you at the start of the game. They cost only 15 coins to plant per plot of land, but you can sell your harvest for 63 coins per plot of land.

This is a return of more than 4 times your initial investment, as opposed to the three and a half times return that strawberries provide. Of course, the soybeans take longer to grow than the strawberries do. Because there are so many factors that go can influence your decision about what to plant, you can see that this isn't exactly a straightforward decision.