OSRS Farming Training Guide 1–99: Tree Runs & Tithe Farm

Reviewed 24 October 2026 · Onyx Services

Train Farming by repeating manageable tree runs while you play the rest of the game. Add fruit trees and hardwoods as their levels and locations unlock, and use herb runs for useful supplies and possible income. Choose Tithe Farm when you want an active session rather than waiting for ordinary crops. A sustainable routine usually beats buying the most expensive saplings and abandoning the skill after two runs.

This members’ guide explains a route toward 99, including your first tree circuit, protection payments, Farming Guild contracts and a beginner Tithe session. It separates time spent working from time spent waiting. Growth continues while you do other activities or log out, but disease and growth-cycle timing can change when a patch is ready.

Choose a routine you can keep doing

A short run can earn substantial XP, but that does not make the reward repeatable every few minutes. If one run gives 30,000 XP in ten active minutes, its active-time equivalent is 180,000 XP/hour. You still have to wait for the next crop. Use XP per run and runs per day when planning a level target.

Early levels: unlock a useful first circuit

Quest rewards are valuable early because low-level crop training is slower. Fairytale I - Growing Pains is a useful project for magic secateurs, while The Garden of Death requires 20 Farming and other Farming-reward quests have their own prerequisites. Complete quests that fit your account rather than treating a list of rewards as an executable level-1 route.

Without questing, begin with allotments such as potatoes, onions and cabbages, progressing as your level allows. Bring seeds, a seed dibber, rake, spade, suitable compost and a watering can. One allotment planting uses three seeds. Weed the patch, treat the soil, plant, tend it as necessary, then harvest and replant when ready.

Making compost also gives small amounts of Farming XP. Bagged plants in a player-owned house offer an active early alternative, but the purchase cost and repeated building actions can be disproportionate to the short early-level target. Do not buy a large supply merely to avoid a few beginner quests or crop cycles.

At level 15, oak trees unlock the first straightforward tree routine. You can keep using oaks until a later upgrade fits your budget. Level 27 adds apple trees, providing a separate fruit-tree cycle alongside regular trees.

Seeds, seedlings and saplings are different items

A tree seed cannot be planted directly into a normal tree patch. Use the seed on a filled plant pot while carrying a gardening trowel, water the seedling, and let it become a sapling. Watered seedlings can mature in the bank. Buying ready-grown saplings avoids this preparation stage; compare their price with seeds and the time involved.

At the patch, your repeatable cycle is to check the grown tree’s health, remove it, plant the replacement sapling and arrange protection if using it. A spade is part of the run kit. Paying a nearby farmer to remove an ordinary tree costs 200 GP and avoids chopping and digging it yourself.

Tree health-check XP is a one-time reward for each tree you grow. Leaving a checked tree standing and returning later does not provide another health check. Special trees with valuable harvests can justify collecting their output before removal.

A simple first tree run: four accessible patches

Start with four oak saplings, four baskets of tomatoes for protection, a spade, the required teleports and coins. Four ordinary-tree removal payments cost 800 GP on a repeat run. Initial empty patches do not need an old tree removed. Keep a rake available at the Tool Leprechaun until you have a relevant weed-prevention unlock.

1. Before teleporting, check that every sapling has its matching protection payment.

2. At a mature patch, use Check-health before removing the tree.

3. Pay for removal, or use your chosen manual clearing method.

4. Plant the replacement sapling and explicitly pay the farmer to protect it.

5. Move to the next patch; record your planting time after the circuit.

Checking four healthy oaks gives about 1,869 Farming XP from the health checks alone. Other actions have separate XP. You can add the Gnome Stronghold patch after arranging convenient access through the spirit-tree quest network; later patches should extend a reliable route rather than make the first run unnecessarily complicated.

Choose tree upgrades by cost, not level alone

Oaks have a nominal growth time of three hours twenty minutes, increasing through the tiers to eight hours for magic trees. Growth-cycle alignment and disease mean that an alarm is a reminder to inspect, not a guarantee that an unprotected tree is ready at that exact second.

Prepare payments as the actual requested items. A basket is an item containing produce, not a loose handful substituted for it. Farmers can accept noted protection supplies, saving inventory space. Saplings themselves cannot be unnoted by a Tool Leprechaun, so bank midway if the expanded route exceeds your inventory.

For a budget routine, compare willow or maple costs with their health-check XP rather than automatically buying magic saplings at 75. The expensive route is useful when the time saving matters and you can keep funding it.

Fruit trees, hardwoods and special patches

Fruit trees have their own patches and are not replacements for the four regular-tree sites above. Apple trees unlock at 27, bananas at 33, oranges at 39, curry at 42, pineapple at 51, papaya at 57, palm at 68 and dragonfruit at 81. Their nominal sixteen-hour growth cycle makes one regular daily visit a convenient starting habit.

Each fruit tree has its own protection payment. For example, apples need nine sweetcorn, pineapple trees need ten watermelons, and papayas need ten pineapples. Do not bring the payment for the previous tier after changing saplings. Checking health and harvesting fruit are different rewards; compare whether collecting fruit is worth the additional time on your route.

Hardwood patches add larger, less frequent checks. Teak unlocks at 35 and mahogany at 55; Fossil Island provides three patches after Bone Voyage. Additional hardwoods and locations exist, including Sailing-linked choices, but have their own access requirements. A higher Farming level does not automatically grant the boat, transport or patch.

Teaks need roughly three days of nominal growth, rather than a daily replacement. Plan hardwoods as an occasional addition to your routine. The gardener payment for teak is fifteen limpwurt roots; mahogany uses twenty-five Yanillian hops. Protection and convenience should be priced against the value of losing a multi-day crop.

Special projects include calquat at 72, crystal at 74 after Song of the Elves, celastrus at 85 and redwood at 90. These differ in patch access, growth and usable output. Celastrus bark is a harvestable resource, while crystal trees supply shards. Check the exact tree’s purpose before paying to remove it.

Protection and compost: use the right safeguard

A farmer’s paid protection prevents the protected crop from dying. It is a separate transaction after planting; merely carrying the requested produce does nothing. When that protection is active on a normal XP tree, compost is not an additional requirement to stop disease.

Ultracompost is an alternative when you choose not to pay, reducing disease risk without guaranteeing survival. Compost also affects yield for suitable harvestable crops, so its usefulness depends on the patch. Do not assume the same benefit applies to every tree or activity.

You cannot buy ordinary farmer protection for a herb patch. Herbs instead rely on compost, applicable disease-free patch unlocks and other effects. Watering is also crop-specific: it is not an extra requirement for ordinary tree or herb runs.

If a patch becomes diseased, address it before expecting normal growth to continue. Inspect the crop rather than clearing an unfamiliar state automatically. For an expensive tree, account for the risk of failure when comparing a cheap unprotected route with guaranteed protection.

Farming Guild: contracts and useful checkpoints

The Farming Guild opens at 45 Farming, with intermediate access at 65 and advanced access at 85. Boosts can be used for entry. A skills necklace provides convenient access, and the central area contains a bank chest and seed vault.

Guildmaster Jane assigns easy, medium and hard contracts through those progression tiers. Grow the requested crop in the guild and claim a seed pack when the contract is completed. This supports ongoing seed supplies, especially on an Ironman, but the contents and assignments vary.

Read the contract before removing a grown crop that could satisfy it. Once familiar with the possible assignments, deliberate preplanting can reduce waiting. Do not copy a high-level preplanting layout before you have the appropriate patches and contracts unlocked.

The intermediate wing includes the herb, regular-tree, Hespori and anima patches; the advanced wing adds later trees and fruit-tree access. Hespori requires 65 Farming and involves a boss fight after growing. Treat it as a prepared combat activity rather than another harmless health-check click.

Tithe Farm: an active session from level 34

Tithe Farm in Hosidius currently requires 34 Farming, not an old Hosidius favour requirement. Golovanova seeds require 34, bologano 54 and logavano 74. Use the highest tier you can plant, but first learn a small rotation with the lower tier available to you.

1. Bring a spade, seed dibber and several filled watering cans; six to eight cans are a practical starting supply.

2. Take a suitable seed tier from the table and enter the planting area.

3. Plant and water a small number of patches in a fixed order. Begin with five to ten plants instead of a large advanced rotation.

4. Repeat the watering rounds in the same order before the plants wilt. Each plant needs three timely waterings.

5. Harvest the fully grown crops and deposit the fruit in the sacks.

6. Refill water before expanding the next rotation, and finish a sensible deposit checkpoint before leaving.

These crops grow in minutes and need attention. Fully grown plants do not die, but neglected growing plants can. Leaving through the door clears the session’s remaining seeds and collected fruit; logging out preserves inventory and score but loses planted crops.

Every third deposited fruit gives a point, with two additional points for completing a hundred. A full hundred therefore gives 35 points. Bonuses make completing the hundred-fruit cycle useful; do not judge rewards using only the first few individual deposits.

Auto-weed costs 50 points and stops weeds returning when enabled, but does not remove existing weeds. The seed box costs 250 points and holds six seed types. The full farmer’s outfit costs 400 points and gives a 2.5% XP bonus. Choose rewards for your routine rather than delaying all Farming until you own the complete set.

Herbs, allotments and an Ironman routine

Herb runs can sit between tree checks, providing Herblore ingredients or saleable output. Treat the seed cost, expected harvest, compost and travel as one cycle. A valuable herb price does not guarantee that its seed is the best purchase, and a dead patch produces no harvest.

Allotments and flowers can be added when their supplies or XP serve an account goal. They also lengthen the run. A player doing a short herb circuit between activities does not have to harvest every available allotment at every stop.

On an Ironman, contracts, available seeds and protection supplies shape the route. A lower-tier tree you can keep planting may be more useful than an expensive tier whose payments exhaust another resource. Keep a dedicated Farming bank tab with tools, compost, teleports, saplings and noted payments.

Calculate the next milestone and budget

Estimate remaining runs using XP from the patches you actually visit, then allow for any unprotected losses. For example, a 100,000-XP target at an illustrative 20,000 XP per completed run needs about five runs. The total calendar time depends on the crops’ growth intervals, not just the minutes spent teleporting.

Net cost includes saplings, protection, removal and transport, minus usable or sold harvest. Compare the net cost per cycle with that cycle’s XP. Prices change, so test your actual purchases before committing a large amount of money to a fixed route.

A useful starting habit is one affordable regular-tree circuit, one fruit-tree circuit when ready and periodic hardwood checks. Add contracts and active Tithe sessions as they become convenient. Keep the route small enough to finish, then expand it when the extra patch serves a clear purpose.

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