One of the farms that I ended up making pretty large as I was trying to cook specific things and needed to collect the ingredients. This farm has what, maybe twenty different things growing in it? I hardly ever plant it as 'field specific'. I guess it would look neater that way but I'm scared of losing an entire area - even though there are no creepers to do that like in regular Minecraft. There are also blueberry bushes all around the town, which are a good thing to have and carry around as 'walking food'. Each little house has a chest or two and a furnace, and although I could do that with one big house it just felt more natural to bounce around.
One of these is strawberry tart / strawberry pie and the other is pumpkin pie. Both are very 'expensive' game wise, in the amount of resources to gather in order to make it. The strange thing, is there is no way to even EAT a pumpkin until you do all of this to make it into pie. I find that very strange. But, it was also incentive to find these things.
The barley seed I have was found in a hamper - (unbreakable wayfarer chest that shows up on mountainsides etc. and looks like a wicker hamper) so I don't know where it comes from 'naturally' - for completeness, wheat and oats comes from regular grass, and cotton and rice comes from jungle grasses 'naturally'. I'll come back and report if I ever get barley naturally.
The intermediate stage of barley is shown here in the front by the path, forming the nodding heads, but still green. It takes a very long time to get to this stage, and it still has another few stages to go through before it is ripe and will drop seed and grain.
The next stage after the above intermediate. It is NOT ripe yet.
The picture below is also not ripe - but shown from another angle.
Barley is not easy to grow. It takes 'forever', and if you try to grab it when it is NOT ripe, you just lose it entirely.
Not ripe! (above picture)
This barley is standing up 'straight' and it is not yet RIPE. I was wrong the first time I tried this - as it goes through a nodding stage and then it stands up.. and I thought 'for sure' that has to be it? But no, very rarely will you get some grain from this but no seeds - and that means losing the crop.
So, this is the ripe stage - it is dried up and olive looking on the stems, with yellow and brown nodding heads. It will drop seed and grain.
It should drop seed and grain both and be replanted. It is quite rare for it to drop two seeds - it does happen, and you hope for it. This is why barley is very hard to grow a 'field' of in survival mode - but it is worth it for the number of things you can make from it.
the pumpkin seeds were also in a hamper, and they grow slowly, then blossom with this yellow flower, much like watermelons. Also, like watermelons, you have to leave some space around them for the separate pumpkin fruits to 'pop' into - or they will never fruit. So, the picture above shows space left near every pumpkin vine with the yellow flowers to assure the pumpkin has somewhere to spawn when the plant is ready. The pumpkins, like the watermelons, need to be hit with an axe. However, the watermelons split into something edible (watermelon sections) and the pumpkins are not edible unless you make pumpkin pie recipe with them. The seeds in both watermelons and pumpkins come only from the finished grown plant (which means no more fruits until one grows mature again) and you may or MAY NOT get a seed when it is broken, so be careful!
Pumpkin that has spawned out into the open space left for it
a bamboo jungle biome that I found across the ocean, bordered by an apple tree/ mushroom forest (not shown), Asian biome and Japanese tree biome (Seen below)
Barva farm (the name of the Smurf village like one above with the four houses) because I couldn't bear to put 'Smurf village' on a road sign *ha* but Barva means 'colorful' so that works.
Cotton
Eggplant
Barley
Oats
Pumpkins
Wheat
Cabbage
Rice
Bell pepper
Stevia
Papyrus
Blueberry bushes
Strawberries
Grapes
Soybeans
Mint
Cabbage
Onion
Wild Onion
Vanilla (oddly, not used in any recipes)
Ginger root
Rhubarb
Garlic
Chicken eggs (sometimes)
Cactus (square type)
Bamboo
Cherry Trees
Silver Maple (Birch) trees
-other things nearby I should go grab and transfer here are tomatoes, cucumber, coffee, sunflower seeds and pineapples are available but I didn't bring them with me from the nearby farms. I have parsley nearby but I can't remember where the lettuce is. I had one major fall in one of the Japanese forest biomes and lost all of my inventory - woke up in the last bed that I had made in a little desert house and sighed, then went on back to the Asian biome castle and started gathering things up and headed off in this direction for now... and have had lots of fun with making the new region.
In real life: There have been tornadoes and flooding around here the past week - it has been a bit stressful. I've been rolling along. We had power outages and one morning was rough as I was supposed to be in to work even earlier to get the coffee cart and breakfast ready for a meeting, and there had been tornado weather and heavy rain the night before, rain still falling, flooding conditions, and woke up to no power. But, it seems that was the end of this storm system, we hope? I'm still doing Japanese and Finnish lessons daily. The Finnish is not too hard, but still second section in Duolingo, which is not beginner. I've made a few really good 'real life!' cabbage recipes with cabbage from a local farm.