The Best Spring Crops in Stardew Valley

Spring in Stardew Valley offers an interesting challenge for the uninitiated. Spring crops yield the least amount of profit compared to other seasons. This makes for a slow start to a new playthrough, or a staggered beginning to a new harvest in your second or third in-game year. Success in the Spring requires careful planning, some patience, and pin-pointing what the best Spring crops in Stardew Valley are. Here’s a selection of crops you might want to consider for your next Spring season.

Cauliflower

When you’re just starting out in Stardew Valley your crop options in the Spring are going to be severely limited. You’ll want to make enough money to buy some Cauliflower as soon as possible. Of all the early Spring crops, Cauliflower is the most consistently profitable. It sells for more than double its seed cost at base quality. It takes a while to grow, but the wait is worth it! Other Spring crops sell for a lot less, take much longer to turn a profit, or have a risk of losing money on random chance (don’t farm potatoes.) If you’re not interested in long-term planning or don’t have many resources available to you, you can always brute force Cauliflower in the Spring for a tidy profit.

Rhubarb

You most likely won’t have access to the desert until after your first Spring in Stardew Valley, but you can’t go wrong with buying Rhubarb seeds. Similar to Cauliflower, Rhubarb has a great return on your investment. Its initial cost might be a bit steep, but you should have enough gold to make the investment by the next Spring season. Rhubarb can easily replace Cauliflower as your bumper crop once you’ve unlocked it, making it the simple farmer’s favorite in the Spring.

Coffee Bean

Coffee Bean is a powerhouse of a Spring crop. It yields four or more new coffee beans every other day, which you can plant to exponentially grow your production. Five coffee beans can be turned into coffee, doubling their value, in just two in-game hours. Coffee beans can be grown in both Spring and Summer, giving you extra time to rake in the profits. The only drawback is how to obtain your first coffee bean. Either purchase it from the traveling merchant for a staggering 2500 gold, or get lucky defeating dust sprites in the mines. If it’s the latter, you’ll be turning a profit from your coffee beans immediately! If it’s the former, it’s going to take multiple seasons of farming coffee beans to make your money back. Save this crop for the greenhouse, where you can grow any crop all year round, to really take advantage of it.

Strawberries

By far the most versatile Spring crop in Stardew Valley is the Strawberry- even in your first Spring. You can only purchase the seeds from Pierre during the Egg Festival on Spring 13. Plant them right away, and they’ll still turn you a better profit than either Cauliflower or Rhubarb. Strawberry plants bear more fruit after their first harvest, so the earlier you plant them the better. Subsequent Springs are a lot more exciting when you save up your Strawberry seeds for the 1st of the next in-game year. With a seed maker, it’s possible to create a grove of strawberries without waiting for Pierre to sell you more seeds. Strawberries make for an excellent early greenhouse crop before you gain access to some of the better crops in other seasons.

Different farms have different needs, so feel free to experiment with your crop choices. If you just want to make money in Spring, however, you can’t go wrong with any of the above crop choices. Spring is just one season to experience in Stardew Valley. As you continue your playthrough, you might be interested in learning what The Best Summer Crops in Stardew Valley are. While you’re expanding your farming operation, there’s a good chance you’ll fall in love with one of the valley’s citizens. You can find more information on each marriage candidate and what they bring to the table here.

Stardew Valley is available on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Windows, MacOS, Linux, and mobile devices.