The Garden Slot: a Retro Review

October 13, 2026 // IOTM Retro Review

It has been quite a while since I’ve done a retro review. This week, to celebrate our brand new garden, I’ve decided to dip back into IOTMs of lore and revisit the various gardens that TPTB have added to Mr. Store over the years. There are a lot of gardens, as it turns out, and I don’t even own all of them! But the analysis is somewhat simplistic for most of the gardens, so I am going to try and dig in on all of them even if I may be unable to give major insights on the former meta impact of a few of the pre-2017 gardens. Hope you enjoy the post!

An Introduction to Gardening

To garden, you place a seed in the earth and expose it to rays of sunlight and water. This, plus some care and attention, should nuture the little seed into a growing seedling, which wriggles free from the soil as it valiantly stretches towards the warmth and energy of our sun. Or, if you’re me, you do this a few times and watch every seed fail to sprout due to obvious soil quality issues and untreated ADHD. Weird that I was discussing this, honestly. Isn’t this a KoL blog?

An Introduction to Gardening… in KoL

Oh, yeah, it is. My bad. In the Kingdom of Loathing, you plant a crop at your campsite. Most of these are little seed packets. The garden will grow a little bit every day, allowing the player to cultivate their chosen plants until they’re ready to harvest. For many gardens, the more time you wait to harvest, the more you’ll get of whatever resultant item the garden produces; or, at maximum growth, you’ll get something entirely different than whatever grows over the first few days.

There are currently ten gardens in KoL. All of them are either Items of the Month or KoL Con items, so they all cost at least one Mr. Accessory. The ten distinct gardens are:

• 2010 (November): Grumpy Bumpkin’s Pumpkin Seed Catalog, producing a Pumpkin Patch
• 2011 (December): Mint Salton’s Peppermint Seed Catalog, producing a Peppermint Patch
• 2012 (October): Pete & Jackie’s Dragon Tooth Emporium Catalog, producing a Bone Garden
• 2013 (September): Gordon Beer’s Beer Garden, producing a Beer Garden
• 2014 (January): Discontent™ Winter Garden Catalog, producing a Winter Garden
• 2016 (November): Granny Tood’s Thanksgarden Catalog, producing a Thanksgarden
• 2018 (March): Pokéfam Guide to Capturing All of Them, producing some Tall Grass
• 2020 (March): Better Shrooms and Gardens catalog, producing a Mushroom Garden
• 2023 (January): Rock Garden Guide, producing a Rock Garden
• 2026 (October): black rosebud, producing a Black Rose Garden

It’s worth noting that there is one other garden-type thing in KoL. It isn’t located at your campground, so it doesn’t quite fit the “garden” mechanic. For 5,000 meat, you can buy a plot within Friendly Degrassi Knoll, which allows you to grow mushroom spores. The mushroom plot is a pretty unique little feature in the game, and has existed since 2005, well before gardens were a glimmer in TPTB’s eyes. It uses a bunch of very cute punnett square mechanics to determine which mushroom you get by breeding different mushroom spores together. This is the closest to actual gardening or planting that you’ll find in KoL, significantly moreso than any of the IOTM garden mechanics. It doesn’t really need much said about it here – after all, the only real ascension value of the mushroom plot is snagging an extremely expensive spooky mushroom for a grue egg omelette on day 2 – but it felt I’d be remiss to not mention it given how neat it is.

Anyway. I’m already covering the Black Rose Garden in its own post, probably next week. The other nine gardens will be covered here! Similar to the Clan VIP Lounge post, I’ll cover each of the IOTM gardens in some detail by themselves. Let’s dig up some soil and get to work!

2010: a Pumpkin Patch

As the first garden, the Pumpkin Patch established the core mechanics of a garden. It grows like so:

• Day 1: 1 pumpkin
• Days 2 to 4: +1 pumpkin per day
• Day 5: 1 huge pumpkin (a new item!)
• … and then on D11, the huge pumpkin becomes a ginormous pumpkin!

Such were the initial mechanics: a flat rate of growth for the first few days, then a new item, then a weird “final” item that generally was worse than anything that preceded it. Alas.

Pumpkins themselves have a number of different uses, most of which were useful for the era’s ascenders. If you simply [use] them, it gives you 3 “pumpkin juice” potions, each of which give 10 turns of +20% item, +10 ML, and +10 spooky damage. For turnbloat, you could mix a pumpkin with fermenting powder for pumpkin beer, which gives three beers at 5.5 adv/drunk apiece. (Or you could put it in a pie tin for a pumpkin pie, for a 3-fullness 5.5 adv/full foodstuff.) You could also combine with a Knob Goblin Firecracker for a 150-turn cooldown Everything Looks Yellow YR, combine with tires and sweet rims for a pumpkin carriage (instead of farming up a Bitchin’ Meatcar), or combine with a bigger stick for a mediocre chefstaff. Since you only got 1/day, you wouldn’t necessarily get to do all of these boosts in-run.

That said, softcore ascenders would have the ability to pull pumpkins. Which is pretty sick – the “huge pumpkin” you got after D5 was a pretty great softcore pull – if you smashed a huge pumpkin, it gives you 3 regular pumpkins. That means pulling one huge was the equivalent of 9 drunkenness or 9 fullness of 5.5 adv per organ space, which was an absolutely awesome return on your liver or stomach in the 2010 meta. Finally, the ginormous pumpkin is a dwelling. It was mildly better than the Frobozz Real-Estate Company Instant House™ in terms of HP/MP restore (50/50 HP/MP, vs the 40/40 of the Frobozz) but nothing you really had any interest in pulling, I think.

In modern parlance, none of this is particularly useful. The 5.5 adv/space you get from the turnbloat items has been pretty considerably powercrept in the 16 years since initial release, and the potion isn’t great. The ELY yellow ray has also been considerably powercrept. Still, it’s probably worth pointing out that 5.5 adv/space was pretty near best-in-class for almost a decade. We’ve got a lot of weird stuff that’s leapt ahead now like the Cookbookbat foods and perfect drinks and IOTM martinis with the tuxedo shirt, but huge pumpkins were a decent enough pull for far longer than you might expect from a 2010 IOTM. I guess the real Great Pumpkin was with us all along.

MODERN RATING: Tier 6, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 1

2011: a Peppermint Patch

The peppermint patch was a bit simpler than the pumpkin variety, lacking a “middle” item like the huge pumpkin… although the actual sprouts it produced had a few more uses.

• Day 1: 3 peppermint sprouts
• Days 2 to 4: +3 peppermint sprouts per day
• Day 5: a Giant Candy Cane

For consumption, you could mix each sprout with a basic booze item to generate a 2-drunkenness booze that gave 10-13 adventures (so, 5.75 adv/drunk, lightly superior to pumpkin beer); this meant each day’s harvest could be used for 6 drunkenness of the sort, so long as you could generate the base booze. You could also use two sprouts to generate a peppermint patty, a 2-fullness food that gave 9-12 adventures (so, 5.25 adv/full, less than the booze or the pumpkin pie). You could also just use a peppermint sprout for 10 turns of Peppermint Twisted, an effect granting +40% init, +50% meat drop, and +10 ML. All of these were pretty decent.

For larger expenditures of sprouts, you could do some different things too. Three sprouts can be used to make a peppermint crook, a cute pickpocket item that doesn’t go away until it has successfully stolen an item. Ten sprouts can be used to make cane-mail pants, a +PVP fight item that can be smashed into candycaine powder, a cute scaling poison item for bosskilling and other fun shenanigans. Eleven sprouts can be used on a familiar hatchling that produces a Peppermint Rhino, a fairy that is of doubled value on candy drops. Fifteen sprouts can be used to make a cane-mail shirt, for +20 ML and +15% meat drop, a mildly useful pull.

I’m saving the best for last, though – if you make a peppermint crook and a peppermint patty, you can meatpaste those two together to get a peppermint parasol. The parasol is an item that gives you free runs from combat. Your first 3 runs are guaranteed free; your next three are 80% likely, and your next three after that are 50% likely. These are on a shared counter to the navel ring of navel gazing and the Greatest American Pants, but as it’s generated through using the sprouts, it’s quite a bit less expensive. It does break after ten successful runaways, but in the multi-day run era that this IOTM was released in, this was still an extremely efficient ten-turns-saved pull for those who didn’t have access to the ring or the pants. It also was the only one of these three items that was usable in hardcore runs… albeit only if you gave up two days of growth to get it, since the patty costs 2 sprouts and the crook costs three.

As is tradition, the final item (the Giant Candy Cane) is terrible and largely useless. It’s a 2-handed staff for +40% candy drops that is necessary to make the garden’s associated chefstaff, the Staff of Holiday Sensations, but it’s more of a collector’s piece than anything of real value.

For modern use, the parasol is actually still a pretty decent softcore pull in unrestricted – nothing amazing, mind you, but three guaranteed free runs is reasonably decent value. The actual garden isn’t particularly good for ascension purposes, since it takes two days to make a crook and the consumables are largely powercrept (similar to the Pumpkin garden)… but it’s neat that a 2011 item still has a usable pull. Good job, peppermint patch! (Also, perhaps worth noting: it has some extra niche use as a highly synergistic garden with Sweet Synthesis, as peppermint sprout and peppermint twist are both complex candies with different modulos, leading to deterministic availability of different synthesis effects. This is mostly useful for automated Community Service path runs, but it is another way the peppermint garden remains mildly-in-use moreso than its direct contemporaries.)

MODERN RATING: Tier 4, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 1

2012: a Bone Garden

The Bone Garden grows 5 skeletons a day. As a skeleton aficionado, this is music to my ears.

• Day 1: 5 skeletons
• Days 2-5: +5 skeletons per day
• Day 6: a Humongous Buried Skull

As with prior gardens, skeletons can be [use]’d in different quantities to produce different results. Using one skeleton gives you a choice between five effects; each effect will give you a distinct skeleton friend for 30 turns, which will do a bunch of different things depending on the type of friend (either a warrior, cleric, wizard, rogue, or buddy). These will do things like delevel your opponent, attack your opponent, restore your MP/HP, give you a tiny bit of meat, give you extra stats, et cetera. They also power each other up a bit, with some cross-skeleton boosts – for instance, having both the wizard and warrior effects active makes the rogue’s initial surprise attack 1.5x as effective, for 15% of monster HP instead of 10% of monster HP. I have always found the skeleton friends pretty neat, and weirdly mechanically complex.

You can also create food and booze. 3 skeletons can be used for a quiche, a 2-fullness, 10-12 adv item (6 adv/full). 5 skeletons can be used for crystal skeleton vodka, a 3-drunkenness, 15-17 adv item (5.3 adv/drunk) that also gives 20 adventures of +25% item drop and +15 ML. You can also make transform skeletons into the following pieces of equipment: 2 skeletons for skis (+init), 4 for a scabbard (doubles sword damage), 9 for a backbone (+pvp fights), 11 for a Bonestabber (a big ol’ sword). There’s also a cute use for 13 skeletons, where you make a Lazybones™ Recliner, an installable bed that gives +2 spooky res and gives you +25% to all stats and +25 spooky damage for 20 adventures when resting. (This has actually gotten more powerful since release, since beds now maintain in your house through ascension. Nice!)

Similar to the pumpkin garden’s meatcar replacement, you could also sacrifice 1.4 days of growth to save 9 turns – using 7 skeletons gives you a skeletal skiff, a quest item that allows you to travel to the Mysterious Island of Mystery, totally bypassing all your shore trips. This is actually pretty cool, and a big turnsave; 9 turns is a lot!

Unlike the prior two gardens, the culminating garden growth (the Humongous Buried Skull) isn’t totally useless. It spawns a boss fight with a skulldozer, which itself drops 20 skeletons – only a loss of 5 skeletons from what you’d get from harvesting the growth over the prior 5 days! It also has a chance to drop a baby skulldozer egg. The familiar is not very useful, but it’s cute, and what are we without our cute skeleton friends? (Also, nicely, you can use 100 skeletons to generate an unpullable but tradable shaking skull, which allows people who don’t own the garden to fight the skulldozer and experience the boss fight. Thanks, TPTB!)

For modern usage, this suffers from the same issue the peppermint garden suffers from. Like with the parasol, it does have the potential to do something surprisingly powerful for an IOTM of this era. Unlike the parasol, though, that powerful thing can’t be pulled; the skeletal skiff is a quest item, so it fades to dust on ascension. And unlike the pumpkin patch, there’s no “huge 12-foot skeleton” item you can use to pull a bunch of skeletons at once. So you’d need to have it active for two days to get the full benefit, which is more days than you’d generally take in an unrestricted ascension. Still, the little skeleton guys are cute, and are useful in cases where you need a lot of unique damage sources. And the quiche is pretty decent too!

MODERN RATING: Tier 4, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 1

2013: a Beer Garden

The beer garden was the new item introduced in 2013’s KoL Con X. It introduced some new and novel growth mechanics:

• Day 1: 3 handfuls of barley, 3 clusters of hops
• Day 2: +3 barley, +3 hops, +1 fancy beer bottle
• Day 3: +3 barley, +3 hops, +1 fancy beer label
• Day 4: +3 barley, +3 hops, +1 fancy beer bottle
• Day 5: +3 barley, +3 hops, +1 fancy beer label
• Day 6: +3 barley, +3 hops, +1 fancy beer bottle
• Day 7: +3 barley, +3 hops, +1 fancy beer label

Nothing else grows after day 7, at which point you have 21 barley and 21 hops alongside 3 fancy beer labels and 3 fancy beer bottles. There’s no special culminating result like the prior gardens, either.

The primary use of the beer garden is to generate – you guessed it! – beer. If you brew together 1 barley and 1 hop (via a [brew] link rather than cocktailcrafting), you can generate a size 1 booze at 6 adv/drunk, giving 50-60 to one of your substats and giving you a fancy tin beer can. You can also brew a beverage, liquid bread, which is a size 1 food at 5.5 adv/full. Once you have both a fancy beer bottle and a fancy beer label, you can generate advanced beers, which give an additional effect (+50 to either mus/mys/mox) and are size 2 booze at 6 adv/drunk. (You don’t get the beer can, though.) And if you happen to have 3 barley + 3 hops + 3 bottles + 3 labels, you can generate an artisinal homebrew gift package, which is a gift item that can be sent to a friend to generate three booze items – either the fancy bottled booze mentioned above or one of three new 3-potency booze items, each with great turngen (6.3 adv/drunk) and some bonkers-good effects (+200% meat, +100% init, or +100% item drop).

There’s also a little bit more you can do with the fancy beer cans. Using one gives you a potion for +20% meat / +10% item for 20 adventures. Using 2 gives a mediocre combat item. Using 4 gets you a quest item (the tin lizzie) that can be used to travel to the Mysterious Island, just like the Skeletal Skiff above. 8, 11, and 16 give three mediocre equipment items with +1 to each of the core stats per fight and a few other minor bonuses. Finally, 32 of them can be used to create a tin roof, a furnishing for your house that gives you +5 PVP fights per day.

For modern use, you could argue that just about everyone “uses” this garden now. Sort of. After the furnishing revamp earlier this year, all furnishings last forever, and there’s no actual competing “roof slot” for the tin roof. So most people do have a tin roof installed. It doesn’t do anything in standard, but gives you +5 fights a day in aftercore and unrestricted if that’s the sort of thing you’re into. Otherwise, it is basically exactly the same as the Bone Garden in the sense that it does something quite valuable (bypass the 9 turns you’d otherwise spend at the shore) but takes an annoying two days to do it. Still, the actual beer produced by the garden is pretty good, and I wouldn’t be totally shocked if there’s a path or two where pulling a Greedy Dog is a decent enough pull.

MODERN RATING: Tier 5, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 2

2014: a Winter Garden

The Winter Garden is most notable (to me) for being constantly mixed up with the Peppermint Patch. There’s no reason why anyone would actually do this, I don’t really know why I always get them mixed up. But I do, and you just spent a few seconds reading about it.

• Day 1: 3 handfuls of snow berries (🫐) & 3 ice harvests (🧊)
• Day 2: +3 snow berries (🫐), +3 ice harvests (🧊)
• Day 3-7: +3 snow berries (🫐), +3 ice harvests (🧊), +1 frost flower

No big culminating thing at the end, as with the beer garden. What you see is what you get!

With two “currencies” of note in the berries (🫐) and the harvests (🧊), the Winter Garden is a bit more complicated than its predecessors. For consumables, the snow crab (2 🫐) is a 1-fullness food at 6 adv/fullness. The Ice Island Long Tea (great joke, 1 🫐 3 🧊) is a 4-drunkenness drink at 5 adv/drunkenness. The berries (🫐) and the harvests (🧊) are also food in and of themselves, both 2.5 adv/fullness and giving minor mediocre effects.

The garden also allows you to make a bunch of melting equipment. This honestly makes a lot of narrative sense. It’s made out of snow and ice, after all. In rough order of usefulness:

• snow mobile (3 🫐 2 🧊 – off-hand), lantern that doubles spells with cold
• snow shovel (4 🫐 1 🧊 – 2-handed polearm), +100% weapon damage, [use] to destroy 3 walls of the bat hole
• bod-ice (1 🫐 4 🧊 – shirt), +25 ML, +25 sleaze damage, +25 sleaze spell damage
• ice bucket (0 🫐 3 🧊 – off-hand), +20% item drop
• snow belt (7 🫐 1 🧊 – accessory), +8 rollover adventures
• ice nine (0 🫐 9 🧊 – ranged weapon), +30% meat, +5 PVP fights

The mobile is mostly useful by dint of it doing something unique; lanterns are pretty rare in KoL, and snow mobile is still to this day the only single-shot cold element lantern. The shovel does something quite unique, too, but does take two days of growth due to the 4 🫐 cost. The rest are… fine.

Somehow, there are STILL useful items left to describe. Remaining items (again, ordered by general usefulness) include:

• ice house (0 🫐 8 🧊 – combat item), permanently banishes a single monster; banish is retained through ascension!
• snow boards (2 🫐 0 🧊 – quest item), +5 planks and +5 fasteners for the Orc Chasm
• unfinished ice sculpture (3 🫐 3 🧊 – combat item), makes a copy of a monster to fight later, a la the 4-d camera
• snow cleats (1 🫐 0 🧊 – potion), 30 turns of -5% combat rate
• snow machine (30 🫐 30 🧊 – workshed item), adds +1 snow berry and +1 ice harvest to every garden harvest, including all non-winter gardens
• snow fort (9 🫐 0 🧊 – housing), replaces your house; gives 80 HP/MP on rest, and gives an effect for +20% item & +30% meat on the first rest of the day
• liquid ice pack (0 🫐 1 🧊 – potion), 30 turns of HP regen

Finally, the frost flower (which is generated with each day’s progress after 2 days of leaving the garden alone) gives 50 adventures of Frosty, which is one of the best effects in the game; it gives +100% init, +100% item, +200% meat, and +25 ML. (Also, it lets you throw frostballs, a 0 MP combat skill for 95-105 cold damage. This isn’t usually very useful, but in some avatar paths it is a cute way to get cold damage for building the Orc Chasm bridge, by allowing you to at least register a small amount of Blech House progress in the zone. Generally, you’d prefer to wish the effect with a pocket wish or the Cursed Monkey Paw, but if you want to pull a frost flower in an unrestricted path that certainly isn’t out of the question.)

Phew! Okay. So. While there’s no one singular thing the winter garden does that is superior to the one-shot power of skeletal skiff or tin lizzie bypassing the shore, there’s a ton of overall utility here, and I think you can make a reasonable argument that it’s one of the better IOTMs of the pre-standard era. The bridge-building from the snow boards is uniquely powerful; at time of release, Blech House didn’t exist, so progressing the chasm generally required a whole lot more turns than it does now, even with people doing the abridged dictionary trick before that got removed from the game in the late 2010s. The fact that it only takes 2 🫐 to get 5/5 bridge parts is also notable; that means in two days, you get +15/15 bridge parts while still having 6 🧊 to spend on… well, not much else, but hey. The actual turnbloat was high, as well, with consumable adventure range here once again skewing quite high; 6 adv/full on the food is great! The 4-drunkenness booze was a crazy-good nightcap! The lantern enabled towerkilling in a lower-power IOTM universe as well, which is a unique power boost. And the -com potion was more powerful in an era before sneaks had taken over most of the necessary noncoms in a run.

Nowadays? It’s less powerful, especially in the context of a 1-day run. But it isn’t zero power; even on one day of growth, you’re still looking at +5/5 bridge parts for the chasm, 30 turns of -5% combat, and a melting +20% item drop offhand. All of that is pretty decent, and it’s a far sight better than what you’d get from any of the previous gardens. I don’t really think modern speedsters would really want to use it, and it’s a rare few people who have access to the winter garden but don’t have access to the better gardens that come later. But it’s still a solid utility player and quite a bit better than most of the other IOTMs of its era. (Also, as with the tin roof in the beer garden above, most modern unrestricted ascenders are using it even if it isn’t their active garden; picking something to ice house before your ascension is a rite of passage for modern speedsters. I generally pick Pygmy Orderlies, as a monster I don’t want to see that’s in 2 distinct zones. But if you don’t own the Peridot of Peril, you probably will get more benefit out of an A.M.C. Gremlin.) Good on you, winter garden!

MODERN RATING: Tier 4, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 0

2016: a Thanksgarden

The Thanksgarden is the first of all these gardens I actually own. So I can talk a bit more actively about how it was used while it was in Standard. Hooray! Unlike its predecessors, the Thanksgarden had a more interesting increase in its harvesting power over time:

• Day 1: 1 cornucopia
• Day 2: 3 cornucopias (+2)
• Day 3: 5 cornucopias (+2)
• Day 4: 8 cornucopias (+3)
• Day 5: 11 cornucopias (+3)
• Day 6: 15 cornucopias (+4)
• Day 7: 1 megacopia

I’ve always felt the Thanksgarden’s increasing yield was a nice touch; after all, this is the actual way a real life garden feels once you’ve successfully got it rolling. Small advance after small advance that turns into a big boost later on. The relative simplicity of the overall harvest mechanics belie a complex set of possible gardening rewards, however. Each cornucopia gives 7 items; 2-5 will be cashews, and the remainder will be raw thanksgiving foods. (The megacopia is a tradeable item that generates a boss fight, which drops nothing of note.)

The raw foods are terrible on their own, giving you 2 adv/fullness and (usually) 30 turns of “The Good Salmonella”, which gives 20% * Fullness to all stats – a nice stat boost, but nothing to write home about. The raw thanksgiving foods can be cooked with the items you spend cashews on to create awesome-quality foods for 4.5 adv/fullness, which also give 20 turns of “Thanksgetting.” The Thanksgetting buff is +80% meat, +40% item, +2 fam weight, and +1 to all resistance; however, each unique awesome-quality thanksgarden creation you eat in a day increases those effects by +40%/+20%/+1/+1 respectively, up to a max of +400% meat, +200% item, +10 fam weight, and +9 to all resistance. (Notably, these were useful for bosskillers in the age before Hobopolis got nerfed, and meant that in my bosskilling days I had to eat a full thanksgarden diet every day I was descending into Hobopolis. This is because post-rollover your remaining turns of Thanksgetting were reset to Thanksgot, a cute joke that nonetheless turns it into a base Thanksgetting buff.)

The items, though? Those are pretty neat. In rough order of power/usefulness:

• stuffing fluffer (usable, 3 cashews); kills 36-46 soldiers on both sides of The Battlefield
• turkey blaster (spleen item, 3 cashews); advances turns spent in your last zone by 5, burning delay
• gravy boat (hat, 3 cashews); decreases evil by +1 on each turn you spend in the Cyrpt
• bread mold (pastable, 2 cashews); pastes with fire of unknown origin to create a combat item that removes 10 protestors in the Zeppelin mob
• glass casserole dish (shirt, 1 cashew); +30 sleaze damage
• can opener (weapon, 1 cashew); +50% hat/pants drop
• mini-marshmallow dispenser (accessory, 2 cashews); +6-8 HP/MP regen
• potato masher (weapon, 1 cashew); +10% spell critical hit
• glass pie plate (shield, 2 cashews); +3 hot res and halved damage from A-Boo peak NCs

The biggest boon here is the stuffing fluffer. Using two fluffers is guaranteed to advance the battlefield enough to complete your 4th quest, which is worth 8 turns of value; even if you do all 3 of the sidequests available to you on turn 0, you’re still killing just 8 soldiers per combat, so you don’t get to the 4th quest until turn 8 in the zone. The stuffing fluffer lets you skip those 8 turns, getting you to 16 kills per fight before you even step foot in the core Battlefield zone. After you’ve gotten there, they’re less useful; if you think of it mathematically, 41 kills (on average) is worth about 5 turns of progress prior to that 4th quest, but just 2.5 turns of progress after that 4th quest. (I usually just split the difference and consider the first two fluffers worth 4 turns apiece. The next 3 are worth 2.5 turns, then the remainder are worth about 1.5 turns apiece.)

While in standard, the turkey blaster was essentially just as good, if not better; 5 turns of delayburn is better than the second fluffer, after all. The problem was, there weren’t really that many great places to use it; most places you’d use a turkey blaster while the garden was standard required you to step foot in the delay zone before using it, and most (though not all!) delay zones were 5 turns of delay. So you’d burn one turn by stepping foot in the zone, then get 4 turns of benefit from using the blaster. The one other issue: the blaster used spleen space, while the stuffing fluffer used nothing. This meant that even for someone who really wanted to use some blasters, you generally didn’t want to spend all of your cashews on blasters, since there were other powerful things you wanted to spend spleen on as well (like pillkeeper pills or space jellyfish jellies or other cute spleeners.)

The other items are largely pretty mid, although two are worth mentioning. The Gravy Boat doesn’t strictly save a lot of turns, but there were unrestricted paths in the early 2020s where pulling it had a decent amount of value; it can be worth about 2-3 turns. Nowhere near the above two items, but nice. It became a bit better after the Breathitin-inspired increase to the number of turns the Cyrpt took back in 2023, since that increased the number of turns you’d accumulate that +1 evil over. The bread mold is quite niche and not a particularly useful tool in most contexts, but in the context of tortoisecore, it’s a nice way to decrease the amount of time it takes to complete the mob of zeppelin protestors; you can use it along with coerced-free fights like Breathitin or legendary seal-clubbing club backward-clubs to clear the mob without using turn-taking NCs. It takes a lot more resources this way, but does save the turn, which can be important in hyper-efficient tortoisecore runs aiming for the lowest possible TC.

Both now and in the past, thanksgardeners really just want the items; the modern ascender doesn’t really care much about the food. And although the buff feels like it should be usable for farming, the 4.5 adv/fullness is a bit crushing for thanksgarden food as a normal part of a farmer’s diet, since that’s a 2.5 adv/fullness loss versus the standard 7 you’d get from relatively cheap Cookbookbat foods. Even at the massive meat drop bonus, it isn’t really a viable option. While turkey blasters were exceedingly powerful during the Thanksgarden’s standard era, there are a lot of better spleen items that you’d prefer to fill your spleen with now, so it’s unlikely a modern ascender grabs it. Realistically, a modern speedster is going to want to snag as many stuffing fluffers as you possibly can.

Also notable: this IOTM just got a pretty major boost in August – the Interesting Coin now allows you to snag the Homeowner’s Loam, which lets you grow your garden into a day #2 state in a 1-day run; this may allow some paths where you could only make one fluffer to get 2-3, or two fluffers and a gravy boat, or whatever the heck else your heart desires. Suffice to say: the Thanksgarden was a powerful tool back when it was in standard, and it remains one of the best gardens today. (Though I’d still say that it was less powerful in its heyday than the winter garden, as nothing the Thanksgarden could do could hold a candle to the 15+ turns you’d get from 2 days of snow boards prior to Blech House being introduced.)

MODERN RATING: Tier 3, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 1

2018: some Tall Grass

The tall grass garden is going to take a lot less time to discuss than most of its predecessors. It’s weird!

• Day 1: 1 patch of tall grass
• Days 2-7: +1 patch of tall grass
• Day 8: 1 patch of Very Tall Grass (capitalization important!)

Unlike prior gardens, where the garden produces some sort of predictable currency, you actually can’t know for certain what you’re going to get from harvesting a patch of tall grass. There are four basic types of items you can get from the grass. Your harvest will select one item at random from the eligible pools.

• You can get melting familiar equipment; there are 6 items that all give +10 to familiar weight, in addition to other small benefits. One of the following is attached to each of the 6 equip items: +50% meat, +25% items, increased fam damage, increased stagger chance, turns familiar damage into minor healing, and stats from runaways. All of these vanish after rollover.
• You can get berries; there are eight different types. All of them give an effect for +6 stats per fight. They also give another effect; most are useless, with the most useful ones being a +1 all res berry, a +100% mainstat berry, and a stinging damage berry.
• You can get unique Pokéfam-only familiar hatchlings; these are familiar hatchlings that are only usable in the Pocket Familiars challenge path. There are 45 of them. (Notably, the garden will only generate these hatchlings if you are currently in the Pocket Familiars challenge path. It also won’t generate any of the other stuff. Not that it matters much?)
• You can get unique familiar hatchlings; these are familiars that are not restricted to the Pocket Familiars challenge path. There are 6 of them: Unspeakachu, Stooper, Disgeist, Bowlet, Cornbeefadon, and Mu.

This… isn’t much, really. The familiar equipment is nice, but you can’t guarantee you get it from the actual garden harvest. The berries are generally just kind of terrible. The Pokéfam hatchlings are useful enough in Pokéfam (and were essential in-run for score runs), but are just collector fare at this point. The familiars are pretty cool; you don’t actually need to be using the garden to get their benefits, but they are unique and powerful in their own special ways.

• The Unspeakachu is an MP-restoring star starfish. In 5% of each resolved combat spent with the familiar, it will extend half of your effects by 5 turns apiece. While this isn’t particularly reliable, it was unbelievably good during the Bosskilling era of KoL, and still retains some niche value for effect extension within the context of certain farming strategies.
• The Stooper grants +1 liver while active. That’s all it does, but it’s a pretty good effect.
• The Disgeist decreases the frequency of combat encounters by floor(weight/7.5), the original version of the Peace Turkey mechanic. As noted in that article, this is actually a sick boost!
• The Bowlet is an attacking fairy. Nothing particularly notable about it, just a fairy that also attacks.
• The Cornbeefadon is both a leprechaun and a fairy-type familiar. That means it increases meat AND items. Nice! Also, if you use something that generates familiar-specific equipment (like the box of familiar jacks or the toy Cupid’s bow), it will generate an amulet coin, for +10 familiar weight and +50% meat drop.
• The Mu functions as both a parrot (increasing elemental resistance by weight) and an attacker (attacking foes with prismatic damage). While in standard, it was generally the preferred familiar for towerkilling the Wall of Skin, given its additional sources of damage relative to other familiars.

Barring Bowlet, these are all absolute bangers. Mu was great in standard for making towerkilling significantly easier, almost trivial. Disgeist was powerful for the same noncombat rate increase that adds some shine to the Peace Turkey, and Stooper was a nice shot of extra turnbloat to get runners over a daycount barrier. Cornbeefadon being a cheap and easy-to-access fairychaun was pretty wonky, albeit not well understood when it was in standard; the fact that it did both was only discovered well after it left standard. And Unspeakachu does something truly unique across all familiars, making it notable even now for some of the more deranged farming strategies.

The thing is? You don’t need the garden active. The tall grass garden does have some pretty useful derivatives. But those derivatives don’t even require you to own the garden at all, and the actual harvest from the tall grass in a speedrun was nearly useless even in its standard era. The only real reason you might want the tall grass garden is as a pull; unlike other gardens, the tall grass garden will generate Poké-Gro Fertilizer as you adventure with the garden in your campground. Using the fertilizer will grow one patch of tall grass in your garden. If you have another garden, and you swap to it with one patch of tall grass active, you will have a 1-growth version of the new garden. This makes it an interesting pull; it was used often in concert with Thanksgarden in unrestricted paths, where you’d start with Thanksgarden and pull the tall grass seeds, allowing you to get 3-4 cornucopias in a single day run. (Well, it used to mean that. Runs are so short nowadays that you really are only guaranteed a single fert in the first 100-150 turns, so it’s basically an ever-so-slightly better version of pulling a Poké-Gro Fertilizer itself.)

Anyway. It’s hard to rate! The familiars themselves are all useful enough that they probably combine to be worth a tier 4-ish IOTM. But the familiars aren’t really part of the “garden” part of this IOTM. Which means that in my book, this IOTM is worth…

MODERN RATING: Tier 5, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 4

2020: a Mushroom Garden

The mushroom garden (not to be confused with the mushroom plot, discussed earlier in this post) came out at the same time as Path of the Plumber, which made it have a bit of a Mario-heavy theming. Unlike its predecessors, it came with its own free fight – each day, you fight one free piranha plant within the confines of the garden. After you fight the plant, you are given an option to either pick the mushroom or use the plant’s remains to fertilize the mushroom. Unlike literally every other garden, the Mushroom garden stores its progress even when you swap gardens out, so you can swap it in daily to fight your piranha plant and get your mushroom advanced.

Depending on what day you pick it, you get the following goodies.

• Day 1: free-range mushroom (3 mushroom filet 🥩)
• Day 2: plump free-range mushroom (3 filet 🥩, 1 free-range)
• Day 3: bulky free-range mushroom (3 filet 🥩, 1 plump free-range)
• Day 4: giant free-range mushroom (1 slab 🍄, 1 bulky free-range)
• Day 5: immense free-range mushroom (1 slab 🍄, 1 giant free-range)
• … and after 11 days of waiting, you can pick a colossal free-range mushroom, which gives an immense mushroom as well as a house-sized mushroom (a mediocre dwelling)

The filets aren’t a whole lot to write home about. They’re fine, all things considered, but certainly a far cry from the turnbloat of earlier gardens; you can mix them with fermenting powder for the size 1 mushroom whiskey, a 4 adv/drunk booze. You can also cook them with soda water for a size 1 spleen item, the mushroom tea, which gives you 50 turns of +20 ML and +5% combat rate (not noncombat rate, to be clear). The slabs are actually neat, though. You can fold a slab into one of the following items:

• Mushroom cap (hat) – +25 ML, +5 adv/day
• Mushroom shield (off-hand) – +40 mus, -20 mys/mox, +5% combat rate
• Mushroom pants (pants) – +40 mox, -20 mus/mys, -5% combat rate
• Mushroom badge (acc) – +40 mys, -20 mus/mox, -25 ML

It’s also an outfit. “But wait,” you say. “If you wear all of those at once, you get +0 to all stats, +0 to combat rate, and +0 to ML. Why would you wear them all at once?” Well, you see, Mushroom Masquerade has the best outfit bonus in the game – it gives +10 familiar weight, +50% init, +3 to all res, and +25% to all stats. So, ha! It’s a great outfit! … noting, of course, the fact that you can’t possibly get it in hardcore without 10 days of tending to the mushroom garden. Or get it in softcore without pulling a bizarre number of items. But hey. Still cool. Cool, but not particularly good – the mushroom garden was the first salvo in perhaps the worst 4-month set of IOTMs ever released for speedrunning purposes. You had this middling weird garden, the left-hand man (largely useless for ascenders), Guzzlr (historically bad IOTM), and the Iunion stones (which is better than it got credit for but is still pretty laughably bad).

I will grant it this: I think mushroom garden is pointedly better than the other three in this set, although it was still certainly the 4th worst IOTM of that particular year. After all, while the booze wasn’t particularly noteworthy, you still got 9 of them if you pulled an immense free-range mushroom, which is quite a lot of decent enough filler booze. I always appreciate an IOTM that creates a few good softcore pulls, and the immense mushrooms definitely fit that bill. And the slabs, for all my hand-wringing, are still pretty good. They’re foldable, so you only really need 1 or 2, and it’ll always let you snag a bit of ML, a bit of turnbloat, and some -com and +com you could use when needed. And -ML is a rare effect, one that was useful for both Grey Goo score accumulation and a few paths that had a particularly hard time with Blech House. And the free fight is fine enough, too.

Actually, it is worth noting there is one strange, cute synergy that exists with the mushroom garden in unrestricted. Because TPTB made the garden into a weird zone you can adventure in, you can actually use portscan (via the Source Terminal) to throw government agents into your mushroom garden. The government agents are higher priority than the noncombat you use to pick/plant the garden, because they’re higher priority than almost everything. Once you’ve encountered an agent, you can use monster replacers (waffles, macrometeorites, or Replace Monster) to turn them into free piranha plant fights. This is (arguably) a pretty bad use of your replacers, but it is technically something you can do, and it is a neat interaction. Still, I don’t really think this is an IOTM garden that’s worth much nowadays, either to the farmers or the speedsters or the fathers or the gangsters.

MODERN RATING: Tier 5, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 4

2023: a Rock Garden

Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for: a Soundgarden. I kept asking TPTB for a Disco garden, but they said that’s not really doable. Disco never dies, after all, and gardens have to die on ascension. So instead we get an eminently killable musical experience: a Rock Garden for the masses.

Unlike most gardens, the Rock Garden features 3 distinct plots, each of which generate a different item, which changes as the days go on.

• Day 1: 1 groveling gravel, 1 milestone, 1 whet stone
• Day 2: 2 groveling gravel, 2 milestone, 2 whet stone
• Day 3: 3 groveling gravel, 3 milestone, 3 whet stone
• Day 4: 1 fruity pebble, 1 bolder boulder, 1 hard rock
• Day 5: 2 fruity pebble, 2 bolder boulder, 2 hard rock
• Day 6: 3 fruity pebble, 3 bolder boulder, 3 hard rock
• Day 7: 1 lodestone, 1 molehill mountain, 1 strange stalagmite

Also unlike most other gardens, there isn’t any crafting complexity here; none of these items can be crafted into anything special. But all nine of them do different stuff, some of it cool and some of it boring and dumb. To wit, ordered from best to jest:

• When used, a milestone provides +5% desert exploration. This is pretty nice; generally each desert combat is worth 2% exploration via the natural 1% exploration + 1% from the shore’s compass. In standard, this ironically was less valuable than it is in a vacuum due to the overlapping survival knife from the MayDay package giving +1% atop that, making it worth 1.6 turns rather than the 2.5 turns it’s worth otherwise. Still good, though!
• The groveling gravel is a combat item that can be thrown for a free kill. It destroys the items of the monster you’re fighting, so it’s a relatively low quality free kill, but it’s an obvious 1 turn saved in literally all scenarios.
• The molehill mountain is a usable item that is not consumed on use; the mountain’s link says [maybe die?] instead of [use]. Once a day, using it spawns a fight with the Moleman, a free but high-power scaling monster that will do its darndest to make sure you die on this molehill.
• The lodestone is a usable item that is not consumed on use; every day, you can use it for 5 adventures of “Loded”, an effect that gives +100% meat from monsters, but can also be used to mine for free in any of KoL’s many mines (the Knob Shaft, Itznotyerzitz Mine, Anemone Mine, and the Velvet/Gold Mine at That 70s Volcano). Those mines are free real estate, with this effect!
• When used, a whet stone adds +1 adventure to the next food item consumed.
• The strange stalagmite is a usable item that is not consumed on use. Once a day, you can use the stalagmite to enter a noncombat that gives you 20-25 stats per level at a chosen stat, capping at 15. So, you know. Like 375 stats at max. It’s fine, I guess.
• The fruity pebble is a silly little potion that gives +10 prismatic damage, +10 prismatic spell damage, and +2 prismatic resistance. Prisma balls, as they say.
• When used, a bolder boulder will delevel the next 11 monsters you face by 50% of their attack and defense, respectively.
• When used, a hard rock doubles the stats from the next booze you drink, a fact that was nigh useless even when it was standard.

As should be obvious, the real value is in the top two items; the Rock Garden isn’t very complicated, but it is meaningfully valuable, giving you 1 freekill and a good 2-ish turns per day of desert progress. This isn’t particularly hard to analyze, nor is it particularly interesting. Milestones were a very nice pull while they were in standard, but unfortunately none of the other multi-day items were particularly useful; a single high-power scaling fight isn’t quite enough to pull by itself, and lodestone wasn’t good enough to be worth the trouble in a universe where you can always just pull ore or summon a mountain man. Still: it’s pretty good!

MODERN RATING: Tier 3, AT-THE-TIME RATING: Tier 3

Conclusion

This was a very long post, with a lot of analysis. A long well-documented post deserves a cool visual summary that can be used to tightly round up all the conclusions into an all-too-summarized bow, letting people who have not read the post chastise and roast the author. It’s basically the main purpose of the internet. So, here’s a tier list!

What a trip through memory lane! One thing that struck me as I skimmed through old KoL forum posts is how high-power the garden slot was during the first 3-4 gardens; basically every one of them had people in the posts waxing philosophical about how game-changing (and in some cases game-breaking) the new garden was. The most curious one to me was the Winter Garden; I’d internalized to some extent that it was powerful, but I never quite put together just how well it fit the needs of the speedsters that used it upon release. (Technically, I was never playing when it was in standard, so it makes sense I’d never really realized it; still, it’s fun to think about!)

Slots are a somewhat controversial concept in KoL nowadays. Many players think that slotted IOTMs are gauche, as they “must” be better than the prior parties to the slot or else they risk being lower-sales than the prior slotted inhabitants. I think this is a silly way to look at it. Slotted IOTMs can benefit greatly from being able to directly compare them to the former inhabitants of the slot; there’s a lot of interesting mechanical implications to how TPTB may have designed one garden or another. Some gardens are more turn-bloaty, some are more turn-savey. Some are thematically novel, some are clearly based around a single joke that’s been beaten to death. And in the end, you have a lot of unique slotted items with different benefits and powers that create different decision spaces for people who own one subset or another of the lot.

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As you might imagine, this was written in preparation for writing a review of the October IOTM, the Black Rose Garden. That post will be coming next week; I want to give KoL’s spaders and puzzle fiends a little more time to try and solve out the puzzle within the IOTM, and (candidly) want to see if we can collect enough spading info to predict which classes get free statues and which classes don’t. Still: spoiler alert, it’s a really good IOTM!

Please, feel free to share your thoughts on this post on Discord or through in-game messages. I often will tweak a post a little bit post-publishing if people point out things I’ve missed. Given the comically large scope of this article, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I missed some important context or fun facts about some of the old-as-dirt gardens from way back when that I’ve never used before.

Article contributed by Captain Scotch