It’s been a little while since my last FarmVille diary, and a lot has been happening down on the farm. Firstly, I’ve discovered that there is a FarmVille podcast – well worth listening too if you want the latest FV news. According to the October 30 episode, the Sweet Seeds event raised around $575,000 for charities in Haiti, which is pretty impressive. There’s no news yet on whether another charity event is on the way. Personally I’d like to combine new FV animals – bees – with a charity event to help fund research into CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). You could have some really cute decorations for bees, too, including different types of hive.

Bees would be happier on the farms now that Flowers have been introduced. Flowers are sown and harvested just like other crops on the farm, but each square harvested also gives you points towards a new ribbon – Flower Power. And of course they do brighten the place up!

The new fertilizer bags have settled in, and you get 5 bags of fertilizer per Neighbor, per day – but you can only collect them when you do your friend a favor. You can only use the fertilizer on their crops, and only at the time, so make sure you use them before you head back to your farm. You get 4 coins and 1 XP for each square you fertilize, but your neighbor gets a bonus too – fertilized crops grow much larger and when you harvest them you get 1 XP on top of their coin value. So spreading the fertilizer love is a great way to rack up XP and move up through the levels.

Halloween is over now, and the decorations are disappearing – but according to the podcast there is some sort of storage on the way, so don’t delete your decorations just yet as you may be able to keep them without them taking up farm space. In place of the spooky decoration we moved on to aliens! There were some huge crop circle decorations available for a limited time, and an alien animal. The neon green cows gave a harvest of Milktonium, but it looks like they’ve gone back home for now – so what’s next on the special editions?

If you’re stuggling to achieve your Crop Mastery bonuses (and they give you both coins and XP) then here’s a tip – although generally the number of squares you need to harvest goes up (in some cases a lot) for each level of Crop Mastery, there are a couple of crops for which that’s not the case. So far I’ve spotted that Artichokes and Watermelon have much easier level 2 & 3 targets. Although they take 4 days to mature, if you plant a big enough field it’s possible to gain two Crop Mastery bonuses at the same time. For example, level 2 for artichokes requires just 50 squares, and level 3 is 75.