Life on the Virtual Farm: Farmville

Where else can you grow strawberries in the winter? Farmville, of course! The game is a popular application (part of Zynga's large stash of online amusements) Facebookers can join and play.

Players start out with a small plot of land and can plant and harvest crops for experience and coins. The more coins you get, the more crops you can plant and harvest. With the harvests and plantings, you get valuable experience points which will help you level upwards. What does that mean? More farming capability! Novices will start off only able to plant a couple things, such as strawberries, but leveling up is quick, easy and fun.

Soon you can be planting daffodils and cranberries, buying fruit trees and selling the harvests. All cost money but make money (funny money, of course), and they give you that valuable experience.

For more experience and the added clout, being neighborly works wonders. The more neighbors you get the more chances you get for goodies. You can give free gifts (How nice is it to get an avocado tree when you're starting out?) and often neighbors will gift you in return.

Being a good neighbor wins you coins and experience points. Visit your fellow farmers and shoo away foxes and crows, fertilize crops and feed their chickens and you'll get to enjoy some of that instant karma.

Share your accomplishments on Facebook and friends can click on your announcements and yield rewards as well. (And you can reap those bonuses when they brag about that ribbon they won or the level they've achieved.)

It's a fun, free little application to enjoy. The only cost is a little time (hopefully only a little, since it is addictive). Of course I should add, if you are impatient you can buy coins and farm cash, but I prefer to be cheap and wait. That's a natural part of the gardener-farmer's life: waiting for the crops to ripen, so it works for me.

For this gardener's starved heart in winter's blah moments, it's a fun diversion to harvest some apples and grow some pumpkins and anticipate the day when I can, say, buy morning glory seeds.