Cultivating

A video on Cultivating, courtesy of that Techraan dude!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_aYWKzORSA

Hmm took this up on my magus and had a go. It is a bit pricey to do this too. Definitely need to have a friendly scavenger who can get you watering cans to help out with cost. Not got very high yet - its quite easy to do and most merchants sell what you need so you don't have to find a field to grow anything like you do in LOTRO - how irritating was that! Can stand anywhere and do it which is helpful.

I've spent some time on improving cultivating and apothecary skill, getting both to about 125.

Cultivating does start to turn a profit round about skill 50-75. Not sure where the break even point is. The cost isn't that much; it costs 12cp in ingredients to turn a seed into a plant. You can use pricier ingredients (courtesy of PQs and friendly butchers / scavengers) but they're not critical.
You can (and should) use the crafting merchant supplies to get Cultivating up to 25...trust me you'll need your other seeds for the next bit.
Your big problem you may have with early cultivation is that (as of patch 1.01) the skill 1, skill 25 and possibly skill 50 seeds don't drop in Tier 2.
This means you'll find yourself with a bag full of skill 50 seeds and a Cultivating skill of 40ish. I've known at least 3 people who had to run back into Tier 1 and go seed farming.
Hopefully they'll fix this in one of the patches.

Once at skill 50 you should get your second cultivating slot; makes things somewhat smoother. You'll be spending proportionately longer in Tier 2 than Tier 1 so will have more seeds than you know what to do with.

This brings me to the main disadvantage with the Cultivating profession: it takes up lots of inventory space. There's so many different kinds of seeds, fungi that you'll typically devote at least one bag to it.

Skill 100 brings a 3rd cultivating slot and this makes for a marked improvement; you can now sit by the merchant and devote yourself utterly to maintaining 3 plots, brewing potions etc. Maybe put some music or a film on because it will take some time!
Note the use of Shift and Left-Click to buy a stack of items. Very very handy for purchasing soil etc.

In no time at all you'll build up a steady stream of apothecary ingredients.
Now if you want to make money simply from cultivating, sell the cultivated ingredients back to the merchant. You can get 1s50cp for a typical skill 100 apothecary ingredient... or spend 30cp and produce a potion that sells for 30cp to the merchant (probably more to the auction house though).

For those wondering about the cultivating PQ rewards I'd say they're not worth it. Try one or two for an experiment but at the end of the day its simpler to take the money.

Tier 2 does not appear to drop skill 125 seeds. So to level past about 130 you'll need to head into Tier 3.

For reference I've not made a single item useful for talisman making from cultivating. The two professions do not mix.

Another reference point is that it does seem to be worth using soil, water and nutrient. You can get by without these but the odds of producing wilted weeds (sell for a mere 6cp) seem significantly higher.

I'm not clear if there's a relationship between skill level and quality of ingredients produced / time taken. Maybe time to find some skill 1 seeds and see how long they take...