This guide contains information combined from the wiki, reddit and some of my own experience.

In the Garden, plants and fungi can be grown and crossbred, obtaining new species as a result. Crops provide various benefits depending on the species, some granting passive buffs as they sit planted in the Garden, while others give rewards when harvested. The Garden can be unlocked by upgrading Farms to level 1 using a Sugar Lump.

Ascending will not reset the unlocked seed types, but it will clear the garden of any crops. The Garden has its own equivalent of ascension, which removes all planted crops and seeds except the starter seed of Baker's Wheat, in exchange for 10 sugar lumps.

The Garden's size starts out as a 2×2 grid, and can be expanded by further upgrading Farms with sugar lumps. The maximum size of 6×6 is unlocked at level 9.


As you can see, cost efficiency starts to drop slightly at garden levels 5 and 6 before rising sharply at levels 7 & above.

Plants and fungi can be planted in the garden by clicking on the seed you would like to plant on the left-hand side and then clicking on an empty tile in the Garden. A seed can be easily planted more than once by shift-clicking to plant. At each tick, the game will check three things in order for each tile: age, contamination, and mutation. The length of one tick is determined by the type of soil which is currently in use, though a tick can be triggered instantly by spending a sugar lump.

Age
While growing, the crop ages every tick by its aging value, which in most cases is a randomized number. As the age increases, the crops will grow as bud, sprout, bloom and finally mature after reaching their mature age. The premature stages of growth increase as the crop reaches 1/3 and 2/3 of its mature age. A plant's passive effects will increase in potency with each growth stage, reaching full strength once the crop matures. For premature plants, any passive effects will only be at 10% for buds, 25% for sprouts, and 50% for blooms. A crop will decay once its age reaches 100 unless it is immortal.

Initially, the Garden only has one seed available, that being Baker's Wheat. By leaving garden plots empty, Meddleweed may also appear. These two plants are the most fundamental species of the Garden: Baker's Wheat is the basis for regular plants, while Meddleweed is the basis of fungi. Most new species appear as a result of mutations (created by having two or more parent crops adjacent to an empty plot), but the two basic species of fungi (Crumbspore and Brown Mold) can be found as a result of manually harvesting Meddleweed (older = higher chance). When trying to unlock these 2 plants, DO NOT use the Harvest All tool, as it will harvest any newly spawned Crumbspore & Brown Mold along with everything else without adding their seeds to your collection. However, using Ctrl+Shift+Click is fine, since it only harvests mature instances of plants, rather than the entire garden.

If there is an empty plot, it has a chance to start growing a plant based on the adjacent (orthogonal and diagonal) plots. For example, if there are two adjacent Baker's Wheat, the empty plot may produce another Baker's Wheat or a random mutation: either a Thumbcorn or a Bakeberry. The exact probability can be calculated from random list mechanism. In general, the actual number is close, but not equal, to the base chance and can be approximately tripled. Most mutations require mature crops to trigger, but there are some exceptions. Additionally, certain mutations may also be prevented by having too many of a certain species adjacent to a slot (e.g. Ordinary Clover). See the species section below for a complete list of all mutation conditions.

When both plants have reached maturity, every tik they have a chance to spawn a new offspring / mutations.

Mutation set up

The above picture to the left shows examples of optimal plant alignments for each Garden level when trying to mutate a new crop from 2 parents of the same species (example: Thumbcorn from 2 Baker's Wheats). Green squares (labeled with a "G") indicate planted crops. Empty squares indicate locations for potential mutations.

The second picture shows examples of optimal alignments for each Garden level for mutations from 2 different parents (example: Cronerice from Baker's Wheat and Thumbcorn). The green and yellow squares (labeled with a "G" and "Y" respectively) indicate the 2 types of planted tiles. The light red squares (labelled with an "R") indicate plots that could grow unwanted crops resulting from the mutation of 2 plants of the same type. For example, growing Baker's Wheat and Gildmillet may spawn unwanted Thumbcorns in the R plots.

Note that there are certain plants which require more than just 2 adjacent plants (Juicy Queenbeet, Shriekbulb & Everdaisy). If you're trying to grow one of these plants, DO NOT FOLLOW the mutation setups shown above (they won't work very well for you, if at all). For Juicy Queenbeets, plant 4 3x3 rings of Queenbeets in each corner. For Everdaisies, fill the 1st and 5th rows with Tidygrasses and the 3rd row with Elderworts. For Shriekbulbs, see this section for more details.

For the second chart, level 6 can be altered to remove its unwanted plots by using the setup for level 7 without the empty top row. However, this uses up one more space in the grid, meaning there is one less space for a new plant to grow. This is optimal if you are not actively managing your Garden to remove unneeded or unwanted plants.

Mutation tree


Contamination
Meddleweed, Crumbspore, and Doughshroom are able to contaminate other crops in an orthogonal direction when they are mature. The chance of this happening is very low. When it does occur, the contaminated plant is replaced by the attacking weed or fungus. Immortal plants are immune to contamination, as are certain other species. See the growth charts for an overview of contamination values and immunity information.

There are 34 different crops in the game. Each one has various properties which affect its aging rate, lifespan, passive effects, contributions to crossbreeding, and more. All positive effects (shown in green in the game) such as +x% stack additively, while all negative effects (shown in red in the game) such as -x% stack multiplicatively. The "cheaper" effect of Cheapcaps stacks multiplicatively.

There are 5 soil types in the game, available depending on the number of farms purchased. These can be activated without cost and are active for all plants in the garden, though only one can be active at a time. Immediately after changing the soil type, it cannot be changed for the next 10 minutes, unless a sugar lump is spent to reset the timer. Each soil type influences the tick speed, and most have secondary effects on weed growth, passive plant effectiveness, plant spread and mutation, and auto-harvesting.

Currently, there are four tools in the minigame. Sacrifice Garden is only unlocked when all seeds have been discovered.

Various plants and fungi have a very low chance to drop an upgrade, usually a flavored cookie. Two of the flavored cookies have additional effects, one of which, unlike all other flavored cookies, does not feature an increase to CpS at all.


Once this upgrade is unlocked, all future ascensions will have it immediately available for purchase from the store.

Minimizing seed costs
As you progress further into the game and your CpS gets larger and larger, the cost of planting garden plants will rise in tandem, so trying to unlock some of the more elusive plants out there will often end up costing you an arm and a leg and then some. However, there are a couple of ways to make gardening much more affordable. Unlike the dollars ($) used in the Stock Market minigame, whose value is dependant on your raw (i.e. unaltered) CpS, the prices of Garden plants can and will fluctuate depending on which buffs & debuffs happen to be active at any given time. CpS-increasing effects (like Frenzies & Building Specials) will substantially increase the cost of planting seeds for the duration of the effect, so it is highly advised to not plant seeds during a Frenzy (or any CpS-increasing buff in general) until the buff wears off. On the other hand, things that lower your CpS will decrease seed costs accordingly, making them much more affordable. The best way to minimize the cost of planting a seed is by clicking wrath cookies until you get a Cursed Finger debuff, which has the side effect of temporarily setting your CpS to 0. While the debuff is active, the price of planting seeds will drop to the absolute minimum, which is almost always much lower than the regular, CpS-based price. This makes them surprisingly useful when trying to grow hard-to-get plants like Duketaters, Shriekbulbs and the elusive Juicy Queenbeet. However, Cursed Fingers only have about a 1 in 40 chance of appearing, so Clots, despite being less effective at cutting costs, are still a viable alternative due to them appearing nearly 10 times as often as the leading competitor. To top it all off, wrinklers can also help a lot when it comes to lowering seed costs; having 10 of them at once will halve seed costs while also increasing overall cookie yield (see here for more details).

Unlocking Shriekbulbs
Shriekbulbs can be a bit tricky to unlock. Despite the fact that they can be unlocked in one of several ways, the odds of one appearing are pretty low. The conventional method for unlocking them is by using Duketaters, usually by filling the 1st, 3rd & 5th rows with them. However, duketaters are expensive to plant and only spend a very short amount of time mature. Alternately, you can use Elderworts. While planting Duketaters does have a higher chance of producing Shriekbulbs, Elderworts are cheaper to plant and are also immortal. They will never die & never need to be replanted ever, so this strategy is ideal for players who don't want to be replanting stuff 24/7. (As for the layout, you can use the same pattern as with Duketaters - fill every 2nd row with Elderwort and leave the in-between parts empty.)

Strategies from reddit (thanks to user TheBigLetterE)

To begin with, here are the most common strategies that people use:
• Grow bakeberries or queenbeets and harvest them with a big multiplier (grow in fertilizer, harvest BBs in clay, QBs frozen)
  
• Grow a garden full of golden clovers for super-high GC frequency (use clay once they start to mature)
  
• Grow a garden full of thumbcorn to maximize clicking (again, clay when mature)
  
• Repeatedly unlock every seed and sacrifice the garden. This yields 11-14 sugar lumps per cycle. Many people savescum and carry a seed over (selecting it before sacrifice) to make this process faster, but it's up to you. Definitely do this once to get the achievement and accompanying garden buff.
  
  Self-Maintaining Gardens
  Sometimes, constantly tending to your garden can be a pain, and you wish you could just leave it to its own devices.
  As it turns out, you can. It's not a particularly powerful strategy, but it's certainly interesting. I figured these out by using the dev tools 1-second tick option.
  
  Meddleweed garden:
  
• Use fertilizer
  
• By planting a single Meddleweed seed (or even just waiting around for one to appear), you can have an entirely self-maintaining garden, with about 10-15 weeds present
  
• Why would you want this? I have no idea. On to more interesting things.
  
  Baker's Wheat, Thumbcorn, and Cronerice garden:
  
• Use the wood chips soil
  
• Plant a bunch of baker's wheat scattered around the field
  
• Once they mature, thumbcorn will appear almost immediately
  
• Cronerice will follow quickly after.
  
• Gildmillet also appears somewhat commonly.
  
• These four plants, boosting CpS, clicks, Grandmas, and GC gains/duration will be most of what you see.
  
• If you wait for a while, ordinary clover will appear, as well as shimmerlily.
  
• If you get very lucky, you can even get golden clover once ordinary clover are present
  
• You can get a Bakeberry eventually as well, though this is rare
  
• Also rarely, you can get an elderwort. I would recommend harvesting it, and here's why: It takes up a space and won't reproduce with any of the other plants present. This can put your garden past a tipping point, making it lose the potential to reproduce itself and eventually die out, leaving just an elderwort or two.
  
• Also be careful that some baker's wheat is always present. If too much cronerice, ordinary clover, or elderwort is getting in the way, you may need to occasionally harvest a few. The need for maintenance (or simple repopulation of baker's wheat) arises very infrequently.
  
  Mold/Mildew garden:
  
• Plant brown mold or white mildew. What will happen is you will get fluctuating waves of CpS increase (White Mildew blooms) and CpS decrease (Brown Mold blooms).
  
• By starting with lots of White Mildew or with only about 4 Brown Mold plants, you can make the White Mildew blooms larger than the Brown Mold blooms (there will be more spaces for white milder to appear and fewer for brown mold on every cycle). However, this tends to gradually even itself out.
  
• If you don't mind getting involved a little bit, it's a good idea to turn on Wood Chips during Brown Mold blooms and Clay during White Mildew blooms.
  
  "Popcorn" garden
  
• My personal favorite, this garden gives you a fair amount of cookies with practically no intervention.
  
• Use Wood Chips
  
• You can start with a bunch of Crumbspore, or dive right in and plant what the overall proportions of the garden will eventually be: about 7 Doughshrooms and 9 Crumbspores in random locations.
  
• Once this garden is established, one of your plants will "pop" upon its decay about every 2 minutes, giving you either 1 or 5 minutes of whatever your CpS is at the time.
  
• The only maintenance necessary arises from the fact that 3 nearby Doughshrooms may form a Shriekbulb, which in turn will likely make 1 other Shriekbulb next to it. You can uproot these if you like, but leaving them won't cost you more than about 1% of your CpS when using wood chips, and eventually they will die out on their own.
  
  Clover Garden
  
• Use Wood Chips
  
• A garden roughly 1/3 full of Ordinary Clover will maintain itself
  
• Golden clover will occasionally appear
  
• This leaves plenty of room to have a few Keenmoss and/or Wardlichen reproducing independently of the clovers. These usually last for white a while, but may require an occasional replanting.
  
  Interestingly enough, it appears that the Popcorn garden and the BW/TC/CR garden can coexist in a wood chips garden for a while. Grow a popcorn garden and then plant several pairs of baker's wheat, and both sets of plants will continue to grow. Glovemorel can also appear in this hybrid garden. Eventually, the BW/TC/CR garden will die out because the Baker's Wheat and Thumbcorn get boxed in by longer-lived plants (mainly Cronerice and Doughshroom), preventing their continued spread and reproduction.
  
  A few Keenmoss and/or Wardlichen plants can be added to another type of garden can sustain themselves fairly reliably.

Whiskerbloom
If you tend to idle most of the time and rarely ever click Golden Cookies, you may want to fill the garden with whiskerblooms, as they will boost milk efficacy and thus increase the effects of the various kitten upgrades. Initially, you should plant them in regular or fertilizer soil to speed up the growing process (minimising your CpS to reduce planting costs), then switch to clay soil once they've matured. (The reduced tick speed is actually quite helpful in this case, as it lets the plants stay mature for longer before needing to be replanted.) With enough achievements & kitten upgrades, the whiskerblooms will result in a massive CpS increase. You can also add in nursetulips to boost the whiskerblooms' effects, but be aware that planting nursetulips will both reduce your overall CpS and also use up space that could otherwise be used for planting more whiskerblooms. The base increase in milk effects from the whiskerblooms (without nursetulips) can reach up to 7.2% once all the plants have matured (or 9% if using clay soil), which is nearly 50% more effective than Breath of Milk and only around 2.5% less efficient than a Diamond-slotted Mokalsium. Even better, since milk boosts (like CpS boosts) stack multiplicatively, using the whiskerblooms in combination with the aforementioned effects will lead to an even greater production boost!

Bakeberry
Bakeberry is one of the best plants in the game when it comes to getting lots of cookies really quickly. Filling up an entire field with bakeberries will give you a base CpS increase of 36% once they all mature. Harvesting all 36 bakeberries will yield a whopping 18 hours of CpS! (Note that the total yield is capped at 108% of your bank if using harvest all, so try to harvest them individually instead.) The cookie you get from the bakeberries are also affected by buffs & debuffs. Harvesting during a frenzy can give up to 3 hours and 30 minutes' worth of production for each bakeberry you harvest, so harvesting all 36 plants can yield over 5 days worth of production! However, planting the bakeberries in the first place costs quite a lot of cookies, so you should aim to plant them while minimizing your CpS (see this section for more details) in order to lower those upfront costs and further maximise your gain. Additionally, it's important to note that bakeberry harvesting rewards are capped at just 3% of your current cookies, so they should ideally only be harvested when you have loads of cookies saved up to get a bigger reward. (In order to get the full reward from all your bakeberries, you'd need to have at least 16 hours 40 minutes worth of CpS sitting there in your bank.) While duketaters could potentially be considered "better" than bakeberries (due to sporting a much greater cookie yield), duketaters are a lot more expensive, grow super slowly & do not provide a CpS bonus.

Golden Clover
Filling up an entire 6x6 field with Golden Clovers will grant a 108% increase in Golden Cookie frequency when all plants are mature (135% if using clay soil). This can lead to a Frenzy lasting for several minutes on end, because a new Frenzy cookie will likely appear before the existing Frenzy has ended, extending its duration over and over and over. The increased Golden Cookie frequency also increases the chance of getting combo effects, which can potentially yield massive amounts of cookies.

Nursetulip
Nursetulips are very effective at increasing the effectiveness of other plants. Since they reduce your CpS, Nursetulips should be used in situations where the goal isn't to boost your CpS. (Examples include Wrinklegills, Golden Clovers, Keenmoss, etc.) With a full 6x6 garden, the most effective way of using Nursetulips is to alternate between planting rows of Nursetulips and rows of the other plant. This will have a greater effect than simply planting 36 plants of the desired type, at the cost of slightly lowering your CpS.

Plant usefulness according to TheBigLetterE on Reddit

Plants useful for their passive effects:
• Don't grow baker's wheat. Chocoroot has the same effect with similar maturation but also also a longer lifespan and a harvest boost
  
• Thumbcorn and Glovemorel for you clickaholics out there
  
• Glovemorel buffs clicks by 4% – a massive boost – but has a very short lifespan.
  
• For boosts to GCs, your options are clovers (see below) or one of these 4:
  
• Gildmillet gives a nice buff to your gains and slightly increases effect duration
  
• Shimmerlily buffs gains, frequency, and random drops, but has a shorter life than Gildmillet
  
• White Chocoroot only buffs gains but has a harvest bonus
  
• Green rot boosts cookie duration (not effect duration), random drops, and frequency. Tragically short-lived, however.
  
• Want more golden cookies without having to constantly tend to your garden? Ordinary clovers are your best bet.
  
• If you don't mind planting often, Golden Clovers are one of the best plants out there. With all upgrades, 3 new cookies can appear before a singular frenzy runs out. With a field of Golden Clovers, your frenzy will basically never cease, and combos happen much more often.
  
• Elderworts, which buff Wrath Cookies, are useful in the midst of Stage 3 Grandmapocalypse.
  
• Whiskerbloom gives you a large CpS boost, as long as you milk is high
  
• If you don't have that much milk or if you prefer longer-lived plants, Drowsyfern gives the biggest CpS boost.
  
• The downside is that a full garden of Drowsyferns basically prevents GCs from spawning and makes clicking practically useless.
  
• If you're feeling festive or hunting for Eldeer, Chimerose boosts reindeer frequency and effects. You need to be pretty active to catch the benefits from these plants.
  
• If you have a full set of wrinklers but want less Wrath cookies (for example, when in Stage 1 Grandmapocalypse), wardlichens will give you a higher percentage of GCs for your wrinklers to feast on.
  
• If you're hunting for those easter eggs, Keenmoss gives a major boost to their frequency.
  
• Queenbeets' boost to GC effect duration isn't worth the hit in CpS
  
• If you're trying to get those last few JS Consoles, Cheapcaps can bring down the cost
  
• Wrinklegills are great for trying to get Shinys and for multiplying the withered CpS
  
• With the right setups, upwards of 90% of your cookies can be withered, majorly increasing the rewards for Elder Frenzies, Building Specials, and Frenzies clicker during the Grandmapocalypse
  
  Plants Useful For Their Harvest Rewards:
  
• Chocoroot and White Chocoroot are great for quick-turnaround harvest boosts. Useful when you have a small bank (so that it doesn't take a rare stack of multipliers to maximize their effect)
  
• Queenbeets can quadruple your bank about every 3.5 hours (make sure to harvest when frozen to increase your CpS)
  
• Bakeberries can triple your bank about every 2 hours, but require a larger multiplier to reach their cap. Harvest them on clay to maximize your CpS.
  
• Duketaters give a vary large boost, but don't expect to have more than about 1/3 of the ones you planted ever to be mature at the same time.
  When harvesting a garden of BBs, QBs, or DTs, turn on the golden switch and shimmering veil if your bank is very large. Even though the switches are a big startup cost, doing this makes it much easier to maximize these plants' potential (to reach their % of bank cap).
  
  Mostly Useless Plants:
  
• Fool's Bolete (net decrease in GC usefulness, no mutations)
  
• Meddleweed after getting it's mutations (no effects, can overtake plants)
  
• Shriekbulb (unless you have one plant you want to reduce the effects of while keeping the rest of your garden active)