How to Grow Wheat Faster

Growing crops is crucial in Minecraft to help keep you sustainable. Any good base is not complete without a wheat farm, wheat can help you get meat, wool, bread, and much more. It is a staple in the game and you will need plenty of it.

You can grow wheat faster if you optimize your farm, utilize bees, or use bone meal on your wheat farm. Keep reading if you want to learn how to have the quickest and most efficient wheat farm possible.

How to grow wheat

Growing wheat is similar to growing almost any crop in Minecraft. You will need wheat seeds (java) or seeds (bedrock), a water source, and a hoe. Wheat seeds are pretty easy to find, you can find them by cutting down tall grass as you walk around, seeds will occasionally fall out of the grass as you cut it down. To cut tall grass, all you have to do is mine it, it doesn't require any special tools you can cut it with your hand with one click.

If you stumble across almost any village, you are bound to see some wheat farms there which you can harvest to take the existing wheat and get some wheat seeds to plant at your base. You also may come across some seeds in some of the villagers' chests.

Once you find seeds, you will need to find a water source to plant them next to. Wheat requires that the soil they are in be next to water. If you are just starting out in the early game it is best to save your iron and not make a bucket, but to plant them near existing water sources you find in your world.

Lastly, you will need to craft a hoe to till the land before you plant your seeds. To till the land you will want to left-click on the block you wish to till. If you are playing on console you will want to use the command "use" rather than "mine." Once you till your soil you can plant your wheat seeds and wait for them to mature and harvest the wheat from them.

How to layout your wheat farm

The layout of your farm will really depend on your preference. If you are just starting out planting wheat around existing water sources as much as you can would be ideal, such as next to a lake, river, or ocean. If you are further along and already have a bucket you can clear an area and put your water source wherever you'd like. You can fill your bucket with water by going up to any existing water sources and collecting the water.

One block of water can hydrate and support an eight by eight square of tilled soil which you can plant wheat on. Optimizing the space around you will help you grow as much wheat as you possibly can in a given area. You will be more efficient if you do not waste space.

How light can impact your wheat farm

To grow wheat you have to be in environment that has enough light in the given area. This is crucial if you plan on staying up through the night, you will want to make sure your wheat has enough light to continue growing while you are still awake. This is especially true if you plan on going down and strip mining where you won't be paying attention to the time of day. If you want your wheat to grow faster you will want to make use of both the daylight hours and night time.

This can also allow you to grow wheat under ground. If you lay enough torches, lanterns, or jack-o-lanterns around you can grow your wheat completely underground. Wheat farms are a great addition to any underground base because they are an easy to maintain food source.

You will need either coal or charcoal to create torches which are required to make both lanterns and jack-o-lanterns. I wrote this article which goes into more detail about both coal and charcoal. Coal and charcoal are necessary for torches but also make great early game fuel.

How Bees can impact your wheat farm

Bees were added to Minecraft during the 1.15 update in 2019. Bees are a non-aggressive mob and will spawn in bee nests around your world. You can find bee nests on either, oak or birch trees in a variety of biomes.

Bees will fly around and pollinate nearby flowers and then fly back to their nest or hives to make honey and honeycomb. You can tell whether a bee has recently pollinated a flower because you will see small yellow particles falling from the back of the bee.

If you want to learn about the differences between a bee nests and bee hives you can learn which ones can be crafted and how to move a been nests without breaking it in this article.

These particles can help crops, including wheat, grow faster. If a bee happens to fly over your wheat farm after they have recently pollinated flowers some of the particles will drop off the bee and land on your wheat. When this happens you will see a small green sparkle animation from your wheat. This indicates that it is has gained a small bump in progress to the next stage in maturity.

Bees are a great addition to your farm because they are a passive way you can speed up your wheat farm without having to tend to it. You can manipulate your surroundings so that the bees will have to fly over your farm to pollinate flowers and fly back over your farm to get back to their hive or nest.

You can do this by placing either the best nest or beehives on one end of the farm and flowers on the other side of the farm. You will need to make sure that there are not any other flowers around that might be closer to your bees. Bees are programmed to go to the nearest flowers so if there is a flower behind the bee hive or bee nest that is closer than the ones on the other side of your farm those bees won't be flying over your farm and helping your wheat grow faster.

How Bone Meal works and how to make it

While bees can help your wheat progress quickly, bone meal out performs the impact that bees can have. While the pollinating particles will add a good amount of progress your wheat's current life stage, bone meal will make your wheat go from it's current life stage to the next.

It takes exactly two bone meals to take a newly planted wheat seed to a fully mature wheat crop that can be harvested.

Bone meal can be made one of two ways, the first way is to use bones found from fighting skeleton mobs and craft it into bone meal. This is probably the most efficient way, especially if you find a skeleton spawner and use it to create a skeleton farm.

You can also choose to use a composter which is a block that looks like a barrel that you can set anywhere and throw plant or food objects in the composter to bring the composter level to the top and receive bone meal in exchange. You will know whether your are throwing appropriate items in the composter because a green sparkle animation will appear which indicates that the composting level has risen.

Once you have some bone meal you can go up to any crops, or trees and throw the bone meal onto the plant. This will result in the plant moving to the next life stage. You will need to use two bone meals on a single wheat seed to have a fully matured wheat crop.