Greenhouse

greenhouse      (standing on your greenhouse floor: open the Greenhouse window)

A greenhouse is a glass-roofed plot on the very top floor of your house, floor 5, where spices grow again and again. Build your house up to floor 5 first (see HOUSES), then lay out a plot from the house window: the first costs 25,000 gold, a second beside it 50,000. A house has two at most, and selling the house gives the gold back like the rest. The floor is still a room you decorate as you like; a potting bench appears there, and its "tend" link (or typing "greenhouse") opens the Greenhouse window. With two plots, the window has a tab for each.

Each plot has sixteen pots in four places, four pots each: the bench by the glass (bright), the mist bed (damp and cool), the hanging shelf (part shade) and the stove ledge (warm and dim). Plant a spice you carry in an empty pot: it stays, and flowers again and again. Spices turn up now and then while gathering herbs (see BOTANY).

A spice grows fastest in the place it likes, and half as long again anywhere else. The night spices grow only after dark. The weather helps: in clear sun by day the bench by the glass grows a quarter faster, and in rain the mist bed does. It all grows by the clock, whether you are in the game or not.

Pick a spice in flower from the window: a moment's work, then two of it (one if it grows out of its place). Now and then picking teaches some Botany.

About every half hour something goes wrong with a plant in each plot, and you are told if you are in the game: aphids, thirst, white mildew (likelier in rain), or a pot knocked over in a storm (storms bring trouble twice as often). A troubled plant grows at half speed, a knocked-over one not at all, until you fix it with a little task in the window: pick off the aphids, pour just enough water, wipe the mildew, stand the pot up. Each problem fixed gives one spice more at the next picking.

Look after your plants: one not planted, picked, fixed or moved for 48 hours withers. Clear away its dead leaves in the window and it starts again from a fresh shoot, its growth lost. The window warns you when a plant has less than a day left.

Each plot can have fittings, bought one at a time from the window when no pot is picked. A fitting fixes its problem the moment it comes, without telling you, and that earns the same spice more as fixing it by hand (three at most for each picking). So fittings save you the work; they never give more than fixing everything yourself would. Each takes Botany to fit, gold, and herbs you carry, and the gold comes back with the house when you sell it.

The Everdew Cistern holds 4 days of water for its whole plot. Picking, fixing by hand, planting or moving any plant there fills it again; a fitting's fixes don't. When it runs dry, every plant in the plot withers.

You can move a plant to another pot (swapping two), or pull it up to carry it away as one spice. Only your own account's characters can tend your greenhouse.