Where to Get Plants & Gathering Seeds
A garden in Terraria containing Fireblossom, Moonglow, Daybloom, Shiverthorn, Blinkroot, Waterleaf, and Deathweed. All bloom at different times, allowing plants and seeds to be harvested. These are useful in potions and flasks, and harvesting seeds allows for an infinite supply of the plants.
Plants are a feature in all versions of Terraria, from PC to mobile. Making use of them affords a player an infinite supply of materials for crafting potions. Each plant grows in a different area and blooms at a different time. This guide will teach you the location to find each plant, a bit about planters, and when you can expect them to bloom so you can harvest the plant and seeds. Once you've got this concept down and have plenty of materials, see my Guide to getting started with Alchemy and Buff Potions for Boss Battles. For players who know about growing plants and mushrooms in Terraria, you can jump to the Plant List to reference it for bloom times/spawn locations.
Planter Boxes & Clay Pots
Both of these options allow any type of plant to be planted. Planter boxes are sold by the Dryad, and may be used as platforms, thus make the best option for a player with money to spend. Your garden can be more compact and easier to navigate by going between platforms. Place them 3 blocks above one another to allow plenty of room for plants to grow or else you won't be able to place some types of seeds. Planter box styles are merely different looks and give no benefit. Players who have not yet defeated a boss can use Clay Pots, made at the Furnace with just 6 Clay blocks each. They're free and good for an early garden, no better or worse than planters.
Planting Seeds & Growth Times
Once you've collected plant seeds, you can place them into the pots or planter boxes to allow for them to grow. They can be planted in appropriate soil types, but this guide is about farming and planters support all types. I did some time tests on growth times, and many of them are entirely random. You can plant 30 daybloom and have only 5 ready in 24 hours with the rest lagging behind. Eventually they will catch up, so to make a large harvest all at once you will need to wait 2-3 days for the plants to be ready. Then, they must be in time of bloom in order to be harvested.
Daybloom seems to grow fastest, with the others lagging behind a bit. Only waterleaf grows very slowly, but thankfully it's not involved in a lot of combat potion recipes. Plants will grow no matter the time they are planted and whether they're indoor or outdoor, up to the point that they are ready to bloom. When that time comes all of those which have reached that state will be ready to harvest at once.
It's night, so Moonglow is in bloom as I work on building my garden. Other plants are not yet ready to give up seeds.
Collecting Seeds - Plants in Bloom
A plant being in bloom is important to the process of farming. When a plant in a planter/pot is fully in bloom, harvesting it with a Pickaxe will give you 1 to 3 seeds. Doing so before then wastes the opportunity to get seeds to replant it, though you can harvest the plant prematurely if it's grown to the point it could be in bloom. Plants in the wild can be harvested with any normal weapon. Same issue with the seeds, though, so waiting for them to bloom and making a journey to that Biome at the right time is the only way to get a good quantity of seeds. See the plant list below for bloom times on the plants you seek.
These are a bit too spaced, but you can get the idea. Make rows of dirt one block apart and let grass spread there, leaving room for mushrooms to grow in between.
Mushrooms & Glowing Mushrooms
While they cannot be farmed like the other plants here and grow naturally over time, regular and Glowing Mushrooms are both useful in alchemy. Mushrooms grow on normal Forest Biome grass, and it's possible to dig out areas to let grass spread to increase the surface area for mushrooms to spawn. See the picture above for how one might do that using dirt blocks. You actually need only a 1-tile space between the dirt/grass layers for mushrooms to grow, so it can be much more space-efficient. Glowing Mushrooms can be cultivated after visiting the Underground Mushroom biome and slashing up some of them until you get a mushroom grass seed drop. You can then plant that in an above-ground mud area and later convert it into an entire biome, growing many glowing mushrooms and later giving the Truffle NPC a place to live.
Corruption/Crimson Mushrooms
Currently only on PC. For the sake of completion, I list these. There are two other types of Mushrooms in the game, depending whether your world is Corruption or Crimson. They grow on that specific type of grass and can certainly be farmed like the other mushrooms, though they're not used in recipes regarding potions. Vile (Corrupt) and Vicious (Crimson) Mushrooms are used to summon Eater of Worlds and Brain of Cthulu when turned into powders and combined with Rotten Chunks or Vertebrae to summon those two early-game bosses.
The Staff of Regrowth
A somewhat rare staff exists that allows players to get better results when harvesting plants. It acts as a weak weapon, but works well with planter boxes and pots to let you only harvest plants that are in bloom by swinging it wildly, unlike a pickaxe which would harvest them regardless. You may get an extra plant and additional seeds for each harvest. In the wild, it will get around plants needing to be in bloom. So you can swing it while walking through crimson/corruption to get deathweed and deathweed seeds without waiting on a full moon or blood moon. This is also useful for collecting mushrooms, since you could spread grass to platforms of dirt by making a vertical wall with dirt platforms spread across. Mushrooms will grow there, and you can increase your yields in that way.
The Staff of Regrowth is found by adventuring in the Jungle Biome and going underground. Look for treasure rooms there, and you may find it in a chest. It can take a lot of looking, but if you want to horde plants, it's a very handy tool. PC players may also find them in Jungle Crates, which are fished up from large ponds in the Jungle. Either way you seek it, it's not a bad idea to have the Jungle mapped out for when you head here later and engage Plantera and, later, Golem.
Plant List
Listing all the potions each of these plants are used in is outside the scope of the article. I'll publish a list of potions soon enough and provide additional information on farming the ingredients needed for each of them. Plants spawn randomly in places appropriate for them, you then use those seeds to garden. Remember, harvest them in bloom to get the seeds and you can begin replicating them by using clay pots or planter boxes!
Fireblossom and Lava
To grow Fireblossom, until Mobile and Console get the Terraria 1.3 Update, evidently you must use buckets (made with lead/iron) to collect lava in the underworld. Make pits 2 blocks deep and place your clay pots there with the fireblossom planted. It will only boom while submerged in lava, so dump the lava in these pits. Otherwise, you must make repeat trips to the underworld to farm Fireblossom. If I'm wrong on how this works, please correct me.
Pumpkins
Pumpkin seeds are purchased from the Dryad and grow like other plants in Terraria, only 2 blocks wide. They can grow on normal/hallowed grass. The bigger they get, the more pumpkins you'll get from a lone seed, though you must buy more seeds to grow more Pumpkins (strange, since they're full of seeds!) Early in the game, they can be used for Pumpkin Pie at the Furnace. This gives you the well fed buff. Later, with Plantera defeated, more enemies spawn in the Dungeon. Pumpkins can then be combined with Hallowed Bars from Mechanical Bosses and Ectoplasm farmed in the Dungeon to make the Pumpkin Moon Medallion, which triggers the difficult Pumpkin Moon event.
Other Plants
You'll find other plants, but they are not for gardening. Strange Plants and marigolds, for example, are used to make dyes for your gear.
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