So, why no garden timers?

[Gemina]

In real life maybe. But this is a game. Aint nobody got time fo dat!

The game requires you to check your plants. If you don't have time for that, then you don't have time for gardening.

I'd go a step further. Some sort of actual Gardening interface would be a very nice QoL.

Similar to seeing the values for your abilities on the new crafting interface, you could for instance see what effect this soil would have on this plant. You could see percentage chances of what you get based on what was planted where. There would be a Tend All option so you could tend to everything in the given plot at once. And lots of other ideas. I feel things like Gardening and Fishing need overhauls of their entire interfaces, so this information is available in game and not just on outside websites.

Gardening doesn't need a sophisticated interface like that. What gardening could use however is some kind of in-game log that keeps tracks of your gardening so you don't have to go to ffxivgardening to look up something you have already successfully planted, tended, and acquired yield from. Of course, you can do this yourself, but it would be very convenient if the game did this for you.

Can we stop making everything brain-dead for convenience's sake? Flowers in real life don't have purple fog around then when they are about to whither. There is your QoL.

Agreed. One of the first comments in this thread was the ability to tend all at once. Those are the kind of feedback suggestions that would come by giving the community more access to gardening.