Salem

This isn't a question about how to raise purity; the mechanics there are simply enough. This is more how do you do it without constantly shooting yourself in the foot?

First off, cabbage. What do you do with the seed drying time? If you plant your second best seeds while waiting for a new batch to dry, then you have ~1.5 days or more that your best seeds are sitting around. But if you don't, your fields lay fallow for a day or more. I've started sneaking in some massively coaled cereal into the cabbage fields during the drying time, but that's because my second best cabbage seeds suck. Plenty doesn't increase seed stalks as far as I can tell, so I just coal the crap out of cabbage.

Second, pumpkins. Unless you get lucky on a massive S&C, your T1s won't get nearly enough seeds to replant more than 2 fields. I note that I tend to get purity increases or break-evens around 2/7 or so, so that's not enough to sustain me without falling back on older, less pure seeds. Do you use some (read: lots of) lime? Do you wait for T2? What's the distribution of pumpkin stage growing times, because it doesn't seem to be 3/3/3? And how does speed fertilizer interact with it? I have observed normalcy, but other posts suggest apocryphally that it only works up to T1.

Thirdly, general considerations. How many fields do you dedicate to purifying one element/crop pairing? And what do you do with all the excess low purity produce? I don't play enough that I can cook it all before even more is done and it just keeps piling up and up. Maybe that's a sign I should make more ovens/baking tables.

Hey sorry i cant answer the Questions about the purity but some ideas about having to much food, it might help to make more ovens and sell all the extra food and if you want to get rid of it fast just sell it pretty cheap people will buy them faster then you think! its better to sell it all or eat it then to have it just sitting around that way if you ever get raided you can have your silver on your toon and not lose as much as would have been lost.

I usually just use all the extra low purity stuff for filling compost bins. You can never have too many compost bins.

There really are no work arounds for what you are having problems with, unless you want to get a jump start from buying higher purity seeds to plant. Try to make sure that all your fields are at 50-60% upkeep, and you will have enough seeds to replant cabbage and pumpkins.

Believe me, I'm trying to buy in. It's just that nobody on Jamestown seems interested in leaving their caves long enough to let me make them life-sized replicas of themselves in pure silver in exchange for a couple seeds.

As for the problems, there are ways to mitigate it (i.e. lime vs coal vs stage 2), I'm just looking for what's provably the best. I myself can't make that determination without the mechanics, and I can't get at the mechanics without a week or so of growing test crops.