Farming

Farming is a time-consuming but useful skill. It takes a while to grow the crops. You start at potatoes, and at the end you can eventually grow the famed Spirit Tree.

Introduction
The key to getting decent xp in farming is not to stand around your crops waiting for them to grow. You want to plant your crops, go do something else for an hour or two and come back when they're fully grown.

Growing mainly vegetables and herbs is a good way to get decent xp, and get additional xp with trees, bushes and specials. Hops tend to get largely ignored. It is a very good idea to be able to go around all of the patches of a particular type using teleports where necessary. Completing the quests Ghosts Ahoy for the ectophial and Plague City for Ardougne teleport are extremely worthwhile for fast access to patches. Additionally, owning several Amulets of Glory and having completed Heroes Quest will help for fast banking too, though using Rings of Duelling for fast banking is acceptable too.

A few hints/tips:
 * With vegetables, you should either grow the protective flower (only when it's full grown does it provide proper protection), OR pay the farmer to watch your crop for you.
 * With bushes, just supercompost is needed and no bribe.
 * With trees, it is a good idea to pay the farmer to grow them for you.
 * With herbs and other special crops, just use super compost and hope that they don't die.

Guidelines

 * The hardest bit about Farming is all the inventory micro-management that is involved.  Keep it as simple as possible, and do one type of crop in each type of field and teleport around to each farm (see below).
 * Super compost is great - to make it, use jangerberries (collect from ogre island west of Yanille), or Pineapples (collect from Karamja or buy in Grand Tree) on the compost bins. When growing lots of Watermellon, it forms a great super compost ingredient. Once you can grow Palm trees, use the coconut to fill vials and use the shells as super compost ingredient. The coconut shells are great because you cannot accidently eat them.
 * Method 1: Use normal compost, and pay the farmer to take care of the crops
 * Method 2: Use super compost and if they're vegetables, make sure you have the protective flower growing. Players won't need to pay farmers to watch their crops as often.
 * Most vegetables are roughly the same xp, except for the high (rare) ones - strawberries, limpwurt roots, etc.
 * The chance of your plants getting disease or even dying, decreases more and more as your farming level increases.

Tools

 * Rake - for removing weeds
 * Secateurs - for pruning trees or removing Willow Branches
 * Trowel - for putting a tree seed into a plant pot
 * Plant Pots - for planting saplings
 * Seed Dibber - to plant any seed except trees
 * Watering can - to water vegetables and hops
 * Compost - for helping your plants grow
 * Spade - for harvesting or clearing patches
 * Gardening boots - no function, strictly decorative

Patches
The only things you need to water are vegetables and hops, everything else it has no effect on.

Seeds, bribes and experience
If players choose to pay the farmer to look after their crops, noted items can be used to conserve inventory space. Barley malt is made by roasting barley on a range.

Supercompost
You should always try and use supercompost whenever you plant crops. It improves yields and lowers the death rate. The only time you shouldn't use it is when you're planting trees which you intend to bribe for.

The Lunar Magicks spell Fertile Soil can also be used to treat a patch with super compost. You can also use this spell after a crop has been planted in a patch.

Any farmer by a patch can tell you whether an item will make supercompost or not. Just 'use' it with the farmer. The compost bins are located by each of the 4 vegetable and herb patches. They take 15 items, then you must close the lid and come back an hour later when it will have turned into compost. You must use all supercompost ingredients to obtain supercompost, using 14 supercompost ingredients and 1 weed will mean you get normal compost. If you're emptying and filling up all 4 compost bins, it's very helpful if you load the leprechaun up with empty buckets before you start your compost run.

The items that are supercompostable are
 * Watermelon
 * Jangerberries
 * White Berries
 * Poison Ivy Berries
 * Pineapple
 * Papaya
 * Coconut
 * Calquat
 * Cactus Spines
 * Bittercap Mushroom
 * Any herb above Avantoe
 * Any tree root
 * Empty coconut shells
 * White tree fruit from Garden of Tranquility quest.

Pineapples can be easily collected from the plants south of Brimhaven (just east of the Brimhaven Dungeon), or collect Jangerberries from the Ogre Island west of Yanille.

Amulet of Nature
The amulet of nature can be bound to a particular patch, you can either rub the amulet to find out how your crops are doing, or wear it and it will tell you of any changes to your crops. To make one, you will need to spin a magic root on a spinning wheel, make a normal emerald amulet using the crafting skill and string it with the magic string. Then use the nature amulet with the patch to watch progress on that patch. You can only obtain one amulet of nature, and they are untradeable, though all the ingredients to make it are tradeable.

Magic Secateurs
The Magic Secateurs are a reward for completing the Fairy Tale Part 1 quest. When wielded they increase yields by 10% when harvesting vegetables, herbs and hops.

Temporary boosts

 * A cider will boost farming by 1, this is brewed using the Cooking skill.
 * A Mature cider will boost farming by 2, this is brewed using the Cooking skill.
 * A Garden Pie will boost farming by 3, this is made using the Cooking skill.
 * A brown spicy stew has a chance of boosting or lowering farming by 2, 4, or 6 (available as a result of the Evil Dave subquest of Recipe for Disaster.