Farming for Hermits

[Monohan]

Was just curious how many fields a lone hermit should have. Keep in mind that I expect them to continue adding new crops, so I wanna keep things safe

[JinxDevona]

I would probably have 1 per each type of crop you can grow. Eventually when you can grow them all that would be 5. Later when you really get going you can have as many as you can handle.

[Zamte]

I personally have six fields of cereal, six fields of cotton, which I will start to rotate and get to higher tiers eventually, and plan for a block of nine fields to use for cabbage, pumpkins, or more cotton when I need them.

You shouldn't need a whole lot if you're just casually growing them for your own use. However if you want to raise your purity quickly you'll likely want a lot more. Having enough yield to make sure you're planting only your best seeds, while still having enough left over to compost for higher quality humus is going to be essential to making the process quicker.

[MagicManICT]

I had a dozen when I was farming just for myself. I wanted to add another six, but there was a server reset coming, and I was barely able to keep up with the dozen. You'll find you want more as you develop. Keeping influence up on fields can be a task, so you'll only want to use those fields when you want a higher tier crop. Otherwise you'll want to use a common field to grow your bulk foods. The number of useful fields just keeps growing the further along in the game you get.

[Monohan]

What should be the field to compost bin ratio?

[Zamte]

What should be the field to compost bin ratio?

That's going to depend on how you raise them. If you're pushing speed on something like low end cereals just to keep stocks of flour up, then you'll need more.

Every bin produces one humus every two hours, which means 12 humus a day per bin. Each field requires 5 initially and then 2 once your upkeep is down. If you're shooting for 150% speed then fields take around two days to grow for cereal and cabbage, or 2 days and 16 hours for cotton and pumpkins. At base speed it's 3 days and 4 days. Which means if you keep the bins producing non-stop you're able to keep up with 18 cereal/cabbage fields or 24 cotton/pumpkin fields per bin. Of course this doesn't consider any extra humus you use for sake of plenty or influence gains once planted.

Of the fields I plan to have, I currently have twelve, and I use three bins, but they're regularly nearly full, even using humus for fertilizer. You could probably get away with one bin per eight or ten fields pretty comfortably.

[Monohan]

I had 2 fields on a previous character, and I tended to not raise speed, but focused more on raising plenty to 200% using humus, which also raised influence

[ramuller]

I got carried away and set up room for 48 fields of which I used 40 for planting and one set for board drying, I am not sure I will do that again for hermit farming (the more fields, the more likely some of them will give good purity improvements). A lot depends on how much you are into raising crop purity -- I started with this many fields in order to work on getting high purity seeds for all four elements for the food crops.

Assuming we keep with each crop using two of the four field influences, there are only six combinations of two influences -- thus, only six types of field to develop.

[Shiala]

I'm farming for two people and currently working with a layout of 4 cabbage, 4 corn, 4 cotton, 4 pumpkins, and 8 cereal. I also have about 2 dozen garden pots. 4 compost bins has worked out well with that set up. I could get away with less if I didn't have so many garden pots. I don't fertilize with humus right now so my main humus consumer is the garden pots.

[Wournos]

What will the compost bin accept?
I had a look at the Wiki to see what I can add to it but when I try "any berry" (huckleberry and black berry) nothing happens. I can't add them. I don't have anything else I would like to add to the bin (yet).