ChefVille: Return to FarmVille 2 for free Spices

Many Facebook gamers spend their time balancing progress across multiple games, and even multiple genres. After a while though, specific games that you used to play may fall off of your to-do list or get left behind altogether. Zynga has accounted for that in a new promotion in ChefVille, which asks former FarmVille 2 players to jump back into their 3D farms and plant some crops for some rewards.

This promotion is currently limited to players that currently play ChefVille, but haven't played FarmVille 2 in quite some time. If you're an active player in both games, then you likely won't find this promotion waiting for you in your game. If you fall into this promotion's required group, you'll see a pop-up like the one pictured here, which asks you to head back into FarmVille 2 and make some progress.

If you grow at least 100 What in FarmVille 2, you'll be given a free Rapid Rosemary and one 1-Hour Thyme spice back in ChefVille. If you continue to play FarmVille 2 and level up in that game three times, you can come back to ChefVille and receive two Instant Thymes and two Salvage Sages.

Unfortunately, leveling up in FarmVille 2 is a time-consuming process, and if you weren't playing FarmVille 2 before this promotion, it's unlikely that you'll dedicate that much time to the game again, just for some free Spices. The Wheat promotion, however, can be completed in less than a day, and is actually worth your time. Who knew that quitting a game could be so profitable?

FarmVille 2 Groves: Everything you need to know

While trees in FarmVille 2 are great money-makers, it's hard to ignore how much space they take up on our farms. If your farm land is being overtaken by a massive orchard, you can now store your trees in Groves, saving water and potentially earning extra fruit in the process. We're here with a guide to this new Grove feature, thanks to Zynga. Let's get started!

Each grove can hold up to four trees, and if you place four matching trees into the same Grove, they'll produce extra fruit. What's more, Groves not only take up less space on your farm, but store trees also require less Water to grow. A full Grove requires four less Water to grow than trees that are simply sitting out on your farmland. Of course, before you can access all of these great features, you'll need to build a Grove on your farm.

A single Grove can be built using eight Buckets of Paint, eight Bags of Grove Soil, and eight Wood Planks. These are earned by simply asking your friends to send them to you. When you've collected all of the building materials, you'll need to ask four friends to work as builders within the Grove before actually finishing it off.

After a Grove has been completed, it needs to have four trees within it to properly function, and there are a few rules that go along with this. If you place a watered tree into a Grove, it will immediately lose its "watered" status, so don't waste Water beforehand. In addition, if you ever wish to remove a tree from a Grove, it can't be removed until it has matured.

As one final note, the timer for how long it takes to harvest a Grove is measured based on an average of the timers of the four trees placed inside. That being the case, you wouldn't want to place low-harvest time trees in with higher harvest time trees, or it will take those lesser trees much longer to grow than normal. Remember, you can purchase additional Groves in the game's market to store as many trees as you have coins to purchase. Good luck!