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 Farming experience without becoming insanely bored and disgusted with the skill and eventually quitting is to NOT stand around your crops waiting for them to grow. Plant the 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 experience at lower levels. Additional experience can be gained by growing trees, bushes and special plants. 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 Dueling for fast banking is acceptable too. At low Farming levels, traveling between the four allotments and growing crops, flowers, and herbs at all four simultaneously is the fastest way to gain experience. At higher levels, do the same but also grow trees, bushes, and hops at the same time for maximum experience.

A few hints/tips:
 * With vegetables, either grow the protective flower (only when it's full grown does it provide proper protection), OR pay the farmer to watch the crops.
 * With bushes, just super compost is needed and no bribe.
 * With trees, it is a good idea to pay the farmer to grow them.
 * With herbs and other special crops, just use super compost and hope that they don't die.
 * Remember, plants grow even players aren't online! This is extremely helpful, as players can gain thousands of experience points by planting trees, paying the farmer to watch them, and coming back a few days later.

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 Watermelon, 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. Calquat fruits are also a good one-click supercompostable item.
 * 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 diseased trees or removing Willow Branches
 * Gardening 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 allotment patches 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 nontradeable, though all the ingredients to make it are tradeable.

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

Compost Potion
Can be obtained after the Garden of Tranquility quest. It is wise to use it on the compost bin instead of a bucket of compost so you get 15 buckets of super compost out of it instead of wasting it on 1 bucket.

Quests

 * A Fairy Tale Part I (no farming requirement) - 3500 experience
 * Forgettable Tale of a Drunken Dwarf (needs level 17 farming) - 5000 experience
 * Garden of Tranquility (needs level 25 farming) - 5000 experience
 * My Arm's Big Adventure (needs level 29 Farming) - 5000 experience
 * Enlightened Journey (needs level 30 farming) 3000 experience
 * Rum Deal (needs level 40 farming) - 7000 experience

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.)

Trivia

 * When farming was initially introduced on 11 July 2005, jute was 72 exp for harvesting making it one of the best training methods around, this was not corrected for three weeks, suggesting an oversight on the part of Jagex.