Hello, friends! Today, let’s talk about the use and benefits of flower pots in Stardew Valley. Once you’ve repaired the greenhouse, Evelyn will bring you a flower pot and its recipe. The materials required are one clay, ten stones, and one refined quartz.
Early Game Flower Pot Costs and Benefits
In the early game, before you can blast rocks, stones might be a bit hard to come by. However, if you learn my clay farming technique, you’ll have more than enough clay to use on your farm. Refined quartz can be obtained in large quantities using crab pots, but using quartz and fire quartz might be a bit more expensive. According to the actual cost in the first year of spring, a flower pot costs around 300 gold, which is quite affordable.
Uses of Flower Pots
The main purpose of flower pots is to grow crops. Outdoors on your farm, you can only plant seasonal crops, which won’t be attacked by crows. Planting flowers in flower pots doesn’t affect bee houses. You cannot plant seeds outside of your farm, but you can plant tea saplings. However, the primary use of flower pots is indoors.
Indoor Flower Pot Planting
Indoor planting with flower pots allows you to grow crops regardless of the season, similar to a greenhouse, but you cannot plant ancient seeds or use sprinklers to water them. The concept of “indoors” is quite broad, including all indoor areas within your farm buildings, such as your house, coop, barn, greenhouse, and cabins, as well as the slime hutch.
You can also place flower pots in outdoor locations like the tunnel, sewer, Mutant Bug Lair, mine entrance, and villagers’ homes. To move a flower pot with a planted crop, you must use an axe to collect it, but the crop inside will be lost.
Profits from Flower Pots
For those following the Community Center route, the greenhouse will be unlocked in autumn. If you missed the summer profit season, you can use flower pots to recover some profits. A large cabin or tunnel can hold over 100 flower pots, which, with 120 hops calculated, can generate a seasonal income of 1,410,000 gold. With a greenhouse available in the autumn, you can earn nearly three million gold in winter and spring by growing hops.
This strategy is suitable for those who unlock Ginger Island in the second year of summer. Some players may find watering and harvesting hops every day to be too labor-intensive, but with an Iridium Watering Can, watering and harvesting over 120 hops daily takes less than three hours, which is an acceptable effort for the profits earned.
Compared to outdoor planting, reaching a monthly income of 1,400,000 gold in the autumn, winter, and spring seasons will require significant labor, especially on the Beach Farm.
Joja Route and Ginger Island
Following the Joja route allows you to unlock the greenhouse and flower pots quickly, but also to unlock Ginger Island rapidly. Once Ginger Island is unlocked, the significance of flower pots diminishes. Although flower pots are inexpensive, they are not as convenient as planting directly on the ground. The farm on Ginger Island is already large enough to achieve financial freedom within a year, so there’s no need to worry about using flower pots for hops in cabins.
After unlocking Ginger Island, you’ll have access to Deluxe Retaining Soil, the best moisture-retaining fertilizer in the game. Therefore, I believe that combining Deluxe Retaining Soil with flower pots doesn’t have much practical use.
Aesthetic Appeal
Although the game already has many potted plants, using flower pots to grow flowers and crops indoors for decoration can still have a great aesthetic effect.