FarmVille Greenhouse: Everything you need to know

To give us all something to work on over the weekend, Zynga has officially launched the Greenhouse feature in FarmVille. We've known that this feature would be launching in the game for some time now, and we can now finally start to create our own hybrid crops, using seed packets that we can purchase for ourselves.

This is a fairly in-depth feature that is rolling out quite slowly to users, so if you don't have the Greenhouse on your own farm just yet, be patient, as we're sure you'll receive it soon. To start, you'll need to place the frame for your Greenhouse, which is given to you for free the first time you play the game after it updates for you.

Once you place the base on your land, you'll have to begin the construction of the building, which is a three part process requiring Wooden Boards, Bricks, and Nails. The first step to completing your Greenhouse will require four each of these three ingredients. For simply completing the building, you'll be given your first seed tray, allowing you to create a single type of hybrid crop at a time.

Learn more about hybrid crops, and how to further expand your Greenhouse behind the break. After you complete the first phase of construction, you can continue to add building parts to the Greenhouse to earn yourself more seed trays, allowing for more hybrid crops to be created at one time. The second level of construction requires 45 ingredients total: 15 each of Bricks, Wooden Boards, and Nails. This level gives you access to a total of 4 seed trays, and also sees the exterior appearance of the Greenhouse changing to become larger and slightly changed in shape. Finally, the third expansion requires a total of 60 ingredients - you guessed it - 20 each of Wooden Boards, Bricks, and Nails.

As usual, you have quite a few options for how to go about obtaining these items:

Click on the "Ask for More" button to send out individual requests to friends
Find them in wall posts that your friends post to the news feed as they complete the construction of buildings
Purchase them for 1 Farm Cash each
Find them within Special Delivery Boxes

Once you complete the entire expansion process, you'll have access to the full amount of 8 seed trays. Your Greenhouse will become larger still, and you'll finally be able to take full advantage of the space given to you by unlocking new kinds of crops through experimentation (that is, even if you know which two seed types you'll need to combine to create one of the ten new crops, you'll still need to "experiment" to unlock them in full).

Regardless of how many seed trays you own, the process remains the same. You'll see a screen like the one above, where you'll be able to add two individual seed packets to a tray to see if they successfully combine into a new crop (if not, you'll be given an error message). Seeds cost different amounts of money to purchase, ranging from 500 coins for a Strawberry seed packet to 8,500 coins for an Onion seed packet. There are four pages of seeds to choose from, allowing you to mix and match different seed types to create 10 full hybrid varieties.

For an example of how you'll create hybrid seeds, let's take the Lilac Daffy crop. As the name implies, this crop is created using Lilac and Daffodil seeds. Simply add one of each of those crops to a single seed tray and you'll automatically create a hybrid crop. Each created crop takes three days to create, in the "experimentation" process. You can either wait the full three days, or you can send out requests to your friends to speed it up. You'll need three friends total to help, with each friend removing 1 day from the waiting process. Receive all three friends, and your new crop is available to grow instantly. You can also fill each spot for 2 Farm Cash.

No matter which crop you are creating, once you complete this process (either by waiting, asking friends, or unlocking with Farm Cash), you'll receive 50 seeds of this new crop to plant. These seeds will show up in the Market just as any other seed would, and can be purchased, planted, and harvested accordingly. These crops are all masterable, so you'll need to create multiple units of each crop in order to earn these exclusive - definitely show-off worthy - mastery signs.

Keep in mind though, each hybrid crop has its own set of stats, including growth time, harvest price, and XP awarded for planting, so plan ahead to know when you'll need to come back and harvest these new crops. You wouldn't want to spend the time researching them only to let them wither, now would you?

And there you have it - a complete look at crop hybridization in FarmVille - a costly, but arguably worthwhile venture for those crop mastery hounds (like myself), who can't wait to master all of these new crops.