You are beautiful.

Oh! Forgot to mention! Grab a goblin or orc STAT! Their FP takes forever to rise, but they do the most useful job in the game (harvesting crops).

All right I will do that.

What animals water plants?

The earliest one you can get are the elephants. Look for them in the Lava Ruins, first floor. They're slow, but they hit hard.

But to be honest, they're barely worth the effort: before they get higher FP levels they barely water any squares, and often choose to do the squares where you have no crops at all, or where the crops are already ripe. By the time they're worthwhile, you'll already have the better watering cans, and can do your whole field in under a minute. Of course, you pay RP for that, but if you leave some crops in the Green Ruins...

Go on.

One last question: do I have to water the grass I use to make fodder? I know I didn't have to in Harvest Moon 64, but I'm not sure here.

You do have to water grass in this game, even after you first harvest it. Even worse, it can be a bit tough to tell if it's COMPLETELY ready yet, so beware the first time or two.

When you have a 3x3 square of ripe crops in any dungeon, they form a rune (it looks like a ball of light). Touching a rune instantly restores 100-150 RP.

I've left the two 3x3 squares at the Green Ruins' entrance with unharvested, ripe turnips (they never wilt/expire). That way, if I ever need half my RP restored, but don't want to cook/wait for the hot springs to open, I can head there for a quick nip and continue on my day.

I did something similar at the other dungeons as well, so no matter where I am I always have free energy less than a minute away.

....Very nice. Very nice indeed. Much more efficient than cooking and eating trout.

SO BE IT!

Also I can already tell that Runeys are going to be trouble. Do Grass Runeys just disappear if they're the only ones in an area?

Your instincts are dead-on.

They all do that. The only way to get one type to flourish is to balance the entire ecosystem. Fortunately, there are a few tricks that I've come up with, so you don't have to suffer the months'-long hassle that I did.

First, runeys don't die during the first week of each month. In fact, for all of those days each zone gains one of each type of runey that it contains (so to gain more grass runeys, there must at least be one grass runey there at the start of the day). Runeys also never die in your homestead.

Leaving your crops/grass in your homestead unharvested creates one extra runey each day, although the exact runey appears to be random.

Each zone, except your homestead, has a runey affinity, so it produces more of those than the other kinds. Take advantage of that to mass-produce grass runeys, because otherwise they become more rare than splinters from the True Cross.

Zones with at least one water runey gain more water runeys when it rains (but not, apparently, when it snows).

At random, it appears that a zone will mass-produce several of one type of runey. I'm not sure what triggers this.

The amount of runeys that died/were created is randomly generated, within a certain range, at the start of each day.

Zones which are in Prosperity do not lose any type of runey save for two or three grass runeys per day. This is VERY important, as it saves a crapload of effort in maintaining runeys.

If you wait long enough, either grass or water runeys will kill off everything else in the zone.

But it's not worthwhile to micromanage any zone: instead, save up enough runeys to instantly get a zone into Prosperity, and then try to keep it that way.

Sorry for the long answer to a short question. You probably want to know a bit more about runeys. Ask away.

Good lord.

Okay, I'll keep that in mind.

I notice a few places that are better at growing grass runeys, so I'll be using those to make more.

If an ecosystem gets badly out of balance, is it better to just let it spiral, kept barely alive, until I have enough saved up to get the area into prosperity?

How much does it take to achieve prosperity?

Would it be better to leave some plots in my homestead unharvested? Just fodder areas, I suppose.

(also is it normal that my field is still a mess and I'll be relying on help from my Mini Mage to clean it up?)

I originally tried to do micro-repairs on zones which were getting out of hand, but nine out of ten times that just made things worse. All-at-once seems to be the way to go.

Areas go into Prosperity when they gain at least 35 of ALL types of runeys.
I personally left at left eight 3x3 zones unharvested starting in mid-Summer, but that's because my runeys were a mess and I needed each and every last one of them. You could likely get away with much less, if you wish.

And I didn't manage to completely clear out my field until mid-Summer, so don't worry about that. On the other hand, don't do what I did, and plow every square. You need some space for stumps to materialize, or you'll never be able to upgrade your home.