Gardening gated behind Housing is not fun.
Gardening is a rich, complex and very fun activity. As an average player, I just want to be able to garden.
Gardening has previously been gated behind FC Housing. You could garden, if you had an FC House, but then you'd have to vie with diverse motives of an entire FC for what to grow.
So I've been looking forward to the "Personal Housing" patch, as Yoshi said there'd be gardening plots available. What an effing fiasco this is. I won't rehash all the issues. Suffice to say that the opportunity for personal gardening is not available for the majority of average players.
Look SE, all I want is a shack, with three 4x4 garden plots so I can finally enjoy gardening.
Bypass the housing issue by adding community gardens. Let players complete quests to access the community gardens. Make a gil-sink out of it if you want. Just make this content available either by intelligent design or by fixing this laughable nightmare of personal housing implementation.
*** Edits with player suggestions for remedies
1) Instanced apartments in starter cities with balcony to house a garden plot
2) Gardening at Botanist Guild, where players can interact with one another
Would be interesting - would it work...
@Bushido_Brown
The Inn idea I don't think they would do since it would make people camp in there for crafting reasons. Just a guess.
However, the gardening at the Botanist Guild as a separate place, but allowed for all players to interact with each other while doing it would be really cool to me.
I remember my first thoughts about the botanist guild when I went and signed up "Cool, we get to garden right here. Very easy to get to and use. Very cool"
However, it wasn't setup that way and its cool, but a really nice idea.