Stardew Valley Best Crops for Every Season
This Stardew Valley Best Crops guide will teach you what crops you should invest in to maximize the potential of your farm in Stardew Valley.
If you’re playing Stardew Valley, you know that crop selection is a huge part of the game and it determines how much money your farm is going to be capable of making in any given season. Especially at the start of the game, where money is a lot tighter, crop selection is really important.
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So what are the Stardew Valley best crops? I’ll break down for you what the Stardew Valley best crops are for each season. Most guides will just purely tell you how what the sell value of each crop is, but this guide is more comprehensive than that.
I’m taking into account convenience, because some crops are much more convenient than others, as well as necessity, because some crops aren’t very profitable, but you do need them for bundles.
Spring 1 – Stardew Valley Best Crops
In Spring, you’re going to want to plant Parsnips, as many as you can possibly buy. The reason for this is you need 5 gold star Parsnips to unlock the greenhouse, and it’s really best if you can get those by Winter the first year.
If you don’t get 5 gold star Parsnips in Spring 1, that’s impossible. You have to wait until Spring 2 at the very earliest. It’s a huge pain, especially since the Greenhouse is an enormous help during that first Winter.
Parsnips only take 4 days to grow, so you should be able to get 3 yields by the 13th, which is an important date for your first Spring, because that’s when Strawberry Seeds become available.
You want to make sure you get all 5 of your gold Parsnips by the 13th. If you manage to do that early enough, switch to Potatoes, because Potatoes are your most profitable crop until Strawberries unlock.
During Spring 1, you also want to make sure you grow at least 1 Green Bean, 1 Potato, 1 Cauliflower and 1 extra Parsnip of any quality for the bundle. Try, if you can, to get all of that out of the way before the 13th.
After that, on the 13th, make sure you go to the Egg Festival. There, buy as many Strawberry Seeds as you possibly can. Buy more than you think you’ll use, because you want to use them in Spring 2 as well without having to wait for the Egg Festival again.
Strawberries take 8 days to grow and 4 days to reproduce another harvest after that. So, since you have 15 days of Spring left after the Egg festival, you should be able to get 2 harvests out of your Strawberries.
If you’re thinking really long term, you might not want to sell your second harvest of Strawberries. You might want to just stash them to use in the Seed Maker when you unlock it at farming level 9 so you can potentially double your amount of Strawberry Seeds in the second Spring.
To recap: You need 5 gold parsnips, a regular parsnip, a potato, a cauliflower and a green bean. Before the 13th, Potatoes are your most profitable crop. After the 13th, Strawberries are your most profitable crop.
Summer 1 – Stardew Valley Best Crops
Just like in Spring 1, in Summer 1 you’re going to have a bunch of crops you need to produce for bundles. You need a tomato, a hot pepper, a blueberry, and a melon, as well as 5 gold star melons and 5 gold star corn.
Luckily, Summer 1 is a lot simpler, because the most profitable crop, Blueberries, is available from the general store. You want to plant as many Blueberries as you can on the very first day of Summer, because they take a really long time to mature (13 days). Once they’ve matured, though, they produce new fruit every 4 days.
This makes Blueberries ideal for Speed-Gro, so definitely invest in some Speed-Gro fertilizer as well.
While you want the vast majority of your crops in Summer to be Blueberries, you are going to want a patch of corn that you plant early on, because it also takes a fairly long time to mature and it persists through fall, giving you multiple harvests and a longer time frame to collect those 5 gold star corns.
You’re also going to want to play several melon seeds. Probably at least 5-6 3×3 grids over the course of the whole season, because you want those 5 gold star melons. The Greenhouse is a big deal, you don’t want to have to wait an extra year for it.
Aside from that, you can get by with 1-3 hot peppers and tomatoes — you just need a handful of backups in case they get destroyed by lightning.
Fall 1 – Stardew Valley Best Crops
Fall is easy. Cranberries are the undisputed winner here. They take 7 days to mature and regrow new fruit every 5 days after that. So, you should be able to get 5 harvests out of your Cranberries.
Like Blueberries and Strawberries, since they regrow and don’t require a trellis, they’re super convenient and the only maintenance they require is watering, which you can easily outsource to a sprinkler.
In fact, aside from special crops (which you’re unlikely to get your hands on in year 1), Cranberries are the most profitable crop of the year. Buy as many as you can get your hands on at the start of the season and get your Cranberry fields going.
However, keep in mind that you also need 5 gold star Pumpkins, a Yam, an Eggplant, and, if you haven’t already taken care of it, 5 gold star Corns and a regular Corn.
You just need a handful of Yam and Eggplant patches, but you’re going to want multiple Pumpkin patches. So your setup for Fall 1 should be ~60% Cranberries, 30% Pumpkins and 10% the Corn you have leftover from Summer, then just a few Eggplants and Yams to meet the bundle requirement.
Try to unlock the Greenhouse as early as possible, because it’s very important for your first Winter.
Before Fall ends, also, try to buy a ton of extra Cranberry seeds that you can use in the Greenhouse during Winter.
Winter 1 – Stardew Valley Best Crops
Nothing grows in the soil during Winter, which means you’re left to Foraging, Fishing, Livestock and whatever you can grow in the Greenhouse.
If you’ve been following this guide, you have a Greenhouse, which is great for you, because you can fill it with Cranberries and be harvesting those all Winter for additional income.
The Greenhouse is completely independent from all seasonal changes, you you’re going to want to save up some money to put all the fruit trees in there, which can produce fruit year-round without any concern for the season at all.
The Greenhouse can hold 18 fruit trees without any effect on the growing space. Here’s a diagram from the Stardew Valley Wiki that shows the optimal placement of Greenhouse fruit trees.
While Cranberries are the most profitable crop by far, if you have any Blueberry or Strawberry seeds leftover, those are great for the Greenhouse as well. You might want to mix it up just for variety.
It would be a great idea to invest in several Quality Sprinklers to place throughout your Greenhouse so you don’t have to water it every day. Then your farming profits become almost fully automated. Your plants all regrow so there’s no planting, the sprinklers handle your watering, so all you have to worry about is harvesting.
If you’ve been lucky enough to find an Ancient Seed at this point, you’re going to want to plant that in the Greenhouse because, ultimately, Ancient Fruit is the best crop in the game in terms of long-term profitability, and having a Greenhouse full of Ancient Fruit is the best you can do in terms of growing crops.
During Winter, while your Crop growth is automated, you should be focusing on catching rare fish and finishing the mines. Check the Traveling Cart every Friday and Sunday for Rare Seeds.
Spring 2 – Stardew Valley Best Crops
So, you’ve finished your crop bundles and your Greenhouse is full of berries. What are you to change during Spring 2? For one thing, you don’t have to waste your time growing substandard crops like Parsnips. Dig your Strawberry seeds out of your stash and plant them all on day 1.
By this point you may have a seed maker, which means you can take one yield from your Greenhouse Strawberries, turn them into seeds, and plant a whole season’s worth of Strawberries outside on day 1 of Spring with little difficulty.
If you don’t have any Strawberry Seeds left, just grow Potatoes until the 13th when you can buy them from the Egg Festival again. Or, even better, if you’ve unlocked the Desert via the Vault Bundle, you can buy Rhubarb there and grow that.
Strawberries are far and away the best though, so you should really try to have Strawberry Seeds available to yourself on the first day of Spring 2, either via the Seed Maker or from saving Strawberry Seeds from the previous Spring.
If you don’t have the bus to the Desert unlocked yet, try to make sure you unlock it before Summer 2 begins. Also, continue checking the Traveling Cart every Friday and Sunday for Rare Seeds.
Summer 2 – Stardew Valley Best Crops
There’s no question about it, you’re going to buy Starfruit Seeds from the Desert Shop on the first day of Summer 2 and get those going. Starfruit is the most profitable fruit outside of the 2 special fruit (Ancient Fruit and Sweet Gem Berries). Starfruit wine sells for 4500g without any profession modifiers.
Starfruit takes 13 days to grow, so if you can’t get it on day 1 or 2, you’ll only get 1 harvest of it. With that in mind, Blueberries are still your best best if you can’t get Starfruit early enough.
As I keep mentioning, make sure to check the Traveling Cart every Friday and Sunday for Rare Seeds.
Fall 2 – Stardew Valley Best Crops
Have you been checking the Traveling Cart every Friday and Sunday for Rare Seeds? I hope so, because now it’s time to plant them all, and they take the entire season to mature. Rare Seeds grow into Sweet Gem Berries, which sell for 4500g a piece.
They only harvest once, and you lose money trying to reproduce seeds for them, so just plant whatever you’ve been able to get your hands on up to this point for a major payday at the end of the season.
Make sure you save 1 Sweet Gem Berry to give to the Statue in the Secret Forest for a Stardrop!
Aside from that, Cranberries remain your Fall cash crop.
By this point, hopefully you’ve found at least 1 Ancient Seed. As I mentioned earlier, your end-goal for farming crops should be a Greenhouse full of wall-to-wall Ancient Seeds, so as soon as you find one of those, get started on that. It takes them 28 days to mature, but then every 7 days they produce an Ancient Fruit worth 825g (3300g as Wine).
Conclusion – Stardew Valley Best Crops
Just a brief recap of the best crops. Strawberries in the Spring, and Potatoes when Strawberries are unavailable. In the Summer you want Blueberries. In Fall you want Cranberries and Sweet Gem Berries. In your Greenhouse you want all your Fruit Trees, as well as Cranberries (or, if you like, a mix of Cranberries, Blueberries and Strawberries).
Finally, if you find an Ancient Seed, you want to start upgrading whatever you have planted in your Greenhouse to Ancient Fruit right away, making use of the Seed Maker to get more Ancient Seeds.
That about covers it when it comes to Stardew Valley Best Crops for Every Season. Be sure to check out the Games Section for more game guides, and click here for more content related to Stardew Valley.
