You can make a nice sum of gold in Guild Wars 2 by gathering ingredients also known as foraging.

Ingredients are crafting materials mainly for cooks although some are used in other GW2 crafting professions. Ingredients can be gathered from resource nodes that can be found all throughout Tyria. You can find a list of all the ingredients here.

To gather or forage these nodes you will need special gathering tools called Harvesting sickles. These tools lose durability every time you forage a node. After loosing all 50 durability they will disappear and you will have to buy new ones. They can be bought from vendors for gold or for karma. You can also get Mystic Harvesting sickles from chests.

The real money makers are the Farm Nodes – groups of 8 patches or nodes of one type of ingredient. There is one node per map and they are on a 23 hour timer. Some of these foraging node farms are in plain site while other are hidden ore have a jumping puzzle to get to them.

Here is a list of the location of some of these farm nodes:

– Lettuce farm – Queensdale, south of Beetletun in the top most farm area.
– Potato farm 1 – Plains of Ashford, directly south of the Loreclaw Waypoint
– Potato farm 2  – Wayfarer Foothills, scattered around The Osenfold Shear.
– Strawberry farm 1 – Kessex Hills, at Isgarren’s View. To successfully farm all 8 strawberry nodes you have ot carefully make your way down the cliff edges.
– Strawberry farm 2 – SE corner of Snowden Drifts, at the bottom of a cliff near Griffonfall.
– Strawberry farm 3 – Northern entrance to The Black Citadel, west of the Town of Nolan, there is a jumping puzzle to get to it.
– Spinach farm – outside Lion’s Reach to the West, there is a jumping puzzle to reach it.

Here are 3 tips for making gold with foraging:

1. Find the locations of the farms a visit them once a day. Check the trading post for the ingredients that sell well and remember that you can sell them on the spot. If you have more than one character you can double or triple your income.

2. Remember to check have level appropriate Harvesting sickles as you will not be able to gather higher level ingredient nodes with low level sickles. Also remember to check your sickles durability and have a spare one in your bags.

3. If you are doing any World vs. World be on the lookout for foraging nodes. You will find a lot of good spots with high level ingredients so check your mini map regularly.

Now go out and forage some strawberries!