I’ll admit I have gotten a bit lazy when it comes to keeping up with my farming runs. I used to attempt to work on doing both my tree and herb routes at least once a day. Usually with a real attempt to run the herb route at least twice.

Keeping Up With My Farming Runs

For the past week or so the only time I end up doing anything related to my tree or herbs is when I'm just passing by. I did have a bit of a reason for wanting to keep my trees around. I however had been quite complacent with my herb patches.

With how many times I end up finding myself going to or through Falador. I did keep that as a willow tree for quite some time. It is also quite helpful that the bank is just a couple of steps away. As this would allow me to get the proper tools I needed.

The willow branches were still selling off these things for almost 3k gold. I could get up to six of these if they had grown back which takes less than an hour. So, it was a quick 15k-18k worth of gold anytime I found myself in this area worth of branches. I felt that was not bad for how lazy I was being.

Granted if I would have kept up with my herb runs. I’d be getting 130k-170k gold for each time I ran my route on those. More times than not however I was so busy with trying to do a little bit of everything. I just could not be bothered to stop what I was doing. Bank many things I currently need. Then hunt around for my herb run tools and spend the time doing it.

I decided the best way to resolve this issue was to change up my bank tabs a bit. I did not realize one of the plug-ins I had access to allowed me to add items to a list. Then I could just by clicking on a tap have all those items on that list that were in my bank show up on a single page. Making it quite easy for me to just grab all my tools for an activity like my herb or tree runs.

Thankfully I had other ways of getting some farming experience. This skill can feel a bit slow when you are not willing to invest a couple of minutes every day into leveling it up. Was needed some experience boosts.

Garden of Tranquility

I had no idea at the time but that overgrown garden that was around me I'd be working on fixing up. I would end up being sent all over the map collecting different plants. Plants that had different special meanings to the person who owned this space. Those however were not the only thing this garden was lacking. As it turns out there were statues as well that the queen wanted for Varrock Castle.

I was not so thrilled with constantly being called a peasant the many times I'd head off on my journey to find some rare plant to bring it back here. I would later find out that being called a peasant was the least of my worries. All the work I'd be doing in short order would fall on someone who hated everything about it the renovations I'd end up doing to this garden space.

I would also quickly learn it would not matter in the end if what I had done to that garden space mattered or not. I ended up getting my hands on quite a powerful tool called a Ring of Charos. This allowed me to have certain persuasion over certain NPCs in how my conversations ended up going with them.

A decent amount of this quest just had me running around planting different plants in different gardening spaces in the game. At one point I had planted everything I was supposed to. So, I ended up having to wait around for things to finish growing. I also had to hope that everything that I planted would end up surviving. Many of these plants I ended up putting some compost on to try and increase their chances of not having any issues.

Despite my efforts. I not only had one failure but two. This ended up slowing down my progress quite a bit. More times than not what I was planting was more of a favor for the gardener I was trying to get help from than anything else. Making it even more annoying.

Thankfully after some failures were replanted, I ended up being given the information or the contacts I needed to gather the different plants requested of me to bring back to the garden. One of these included a branch of this rather rare white tree I had to climb up to a mountain to get to.

A couple of times I ended up having to steal the seeds I needed. I even got caught attempting to help myself to some rose seeds that were quite hard to come by. Thankfully my new ring helped me get out of what otherwise would have been a rather bad situation of being caught stealing.

Slowly over time, I'd return to the garden with some supplies. I’d bring things back like seeds I had acquired, different kinds of roses, and even some compost to help the garden along. This place was starting to take a new shape once I had removed all the weeds from the overgrown garden beds.

I was quite hopeful I was nearing the end of this quest. After all the garden was starting to feel quite tranquil. I was also running out of spots to place different plants. I however found to my dismay that plants were not the only thing wanted in this garden.

I’d be going out and ransacking different statures from nearby towns. Many times, those towns had guards and they were not so pleased to see someone just walk on up and remove a statue from the front of their castles or town squares.

These statures then would need to be pushed back one tile at a time. Thankfully after moving so many titles closer to the end destination, there was a bit of a cutscene saving me perhaps hours of boring work. I then had to push a couple of statues I ended up stealing a few more tiles to their final resting places.

I then had to go get the king to show him what was done with the garden space. The queen was hoping to please him with the different kinds of flowers that were supposed to have a meaning to either one of them or both of them.

Let’s just say he cared more about how much money must have been wasted on transforming what was otherwise an overgrown dead garden. He hated everything that was selected. Whatever good gesture the queen was attempting he did not see eye to eye with.

After not wanting to hear another word about how much the king hated everything about the place. I decided to use the Ring of Charos one last time. The king was not only going to love what was done. He was also going to reward me for my effort. Thus, he did I ended up getting 5k farming experience and a few different kinds of seeds.

Enlightened Journey

This of all quests I was not expecting to give me farming experience. It gave me a bit of experience in a few other skills as well. It also unlocked another mode of transportation that I have not used since. While I feel it’s cool there is air balloon transportation in this game. Between all the other ways I have to get around, I tend to not even think about this one.

I first had to gather all the supplies that were needed to build the air balloon. Then I needed to bring along some fuel for the journey. Once that was all done, I needed to make the journey to each location at least once the slow way. After that, I just had to pay lower log costs that were used to get me around and not have to manly get myself to each location every time. As that would have taken forever to do.

Any time I wanted to unlock a new location of a couple of places the hot air balloon takes you I had to play this little mini game. Where I had to burn wood to raise the balloon over non-moving objects from birds to buildings. Other times I'd have to release air and lower the ballon. Running out of wood or hitting an object would fail and have to start all over again.

Oddly enough balloon transportation I would later notice would take you close to a couple of different farming patches around the game. Even when I did get back into the swing of running my routes again. I never was able to fit this into it in a natural way that made it work. I always had other methods I just was used to using by now or were just quicker to use.

At the very least I got a little experience every time I unlocked a new route. I would also go on to unlock some medium achievement diaries for doing so. Something great to already have out of the way for whenever I get around to doing more of those.

Final Thoughts

It’s always rather nice when you can take a bit of a break from grinding out a skill and still be making gains even if they are not big ones in it. While there are not a massive number of quests that give farming experience. There is one quest requiring level 70 farming and if I get too lazy about this skill it will be quite a long time before I meet this requirement part of that quest.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Old School RuneScape.