Growing Crops

Farmland is made by using a hoe on dirt or a grass block, and it's required to grow wheat, carrot, potato and beetroot seeds. It needs a light level of roughly 8 or higher reaching it to let anything grow, which works just as well from torches underground as it does from open sky. Farmland isn't sturdy, either: a player or mob jumping directly onto it reverts it straight back to dirt and knocks loose whatever crop was growing there.

Farmland counts as hydrated whenever water sits within 4 blocks of it horizontally, including diagonally, at the same level or one block above — a single water source placed at the center of a plot keeps an entire 9x9 area hydrated. Hydrated farmland grows crops noticeably faster than dry farmland and won't decay back into dirt on its own as long as water stays in range; rain falling on farmland hydrates it too, just less reliably than a planned water source.

Growth happens on random ticks rather than a fixed schedule, so crops mature over real time even while you're not watching, with each tick giving a crop a chance to advance one stage. Bone meal skips that randomness entirely: a single application typically advances wheat, carrots or potatoes by 2 to 5 growth stages at once, so a couple of uses can finish a plant outright. Planting in alternating rows, with a strip of empty farmland or a different crop type between them, actually speeds up growth compared with packing one crop type in solid, since neighboring plants of the same type slow each other down. A fence around the whole plot keeps mobs from wandering in and trampling it.