5. Getting into the alcohol game
By now your farm should be a relatively finely tuned operation, but to really bring in the riches, it's time to get into the wine business. Kegs take around seven days to turn a fruit into wine, but doing so triples the value of the input fruit (even more if you take the Artisan perk). This means we need a lot of kegs to deal with the long turnaround and keep up with our fruit production. Each Keg takes 30 Wood and one Clay, Copper Bar, Iron Bar, and Oak Resin. This is where all that material farming pays off.
You now have a number of options for fruit inputs, depending on your overall game progress and degree of Scrooge McDuckery. The first step is to simply keep with the Berry operation and start cranking out enough Blueberry wine to send Ben Wyatt home in a stupor. But Blueberries shine for their multi-crop harvests and return on investment—not due to a high selling price. Since Kegs take so long to process, using higher-value inputs results in greater overall profits, even if the initial seed is more expensive. If summer is coming soon and you've completed the Community Center bundle to repair the bus to the desert (use some of your berry money for that), Starfruits from the Oasis shop result in an incredible return on investment. The seeds are expensive (400g a pop) but the resulting wine sells for 2400g (3600g with the Artisan perk).
But Starfruits are only good in Summer, and even with the Greenhouse repaired, there's a more efficient option. Ancient Fruit Wine. As soon as you find the Ancient Seed artifact, plant the resulting seed (so long as it's before fall) and wait. It's a long growth period—28 days—but keeps producing fruit each week for all of Spring, Summer, and Fall. The trick here is every time a fruit is produced, toss it in the seed maker and replant. (Deluxe Speed-Gro is your friend here). Soon (okay maybe like months later) you'll have a field of Ancient Fruit crops. The end goal here is to fill your Greenhouse with the lucrative crop (so, y'know, get that done). Ancient Fruit Wine sells for slightly less than Starfruit, but the extended crop cycle means time saved on replanting, as your plants will last forever inside that wonderful glass house.
Image via Reddit poster Ansalem1
Each plant produces a fruit every seven days, matching up perfectly with the Keg's long production cycle. There's 120 plots in your greenhouse. Subtracting four for Iridium Sprinklers (layout your crops like this, that's 116 Ancient Fruit Plants. So 116 Kegs is your target goal. (Aren't you glad you farmed all those materials now?)
Once that operation is running smoothly, you can expand with more kegs supported by Fruit Trees. Redditor OrinMacGregor has a nice writeup breaking down how many Kegs per Fruit tree you need.
It's a lot of work, but the result is a self-sustaining money-printing operation. Just don't get so burnt out along the way that you feel the need to quit it all, move to the country, and run your Grandfather's old farm. Oh, wait...
Correction: This article initially stated that stumps grew back into trees, which is incorrect.