Short answer
Research Zombie Gardening (60 green, 20 blue, after Garden Improvement I), build a Gardener Stand in the garden (4 Wooden Plank, 2 Bronze Detail, 6 Bronze Nails) and put a zombie on it holding a shovel. It only tends beds that carry a crop tablet, and it takes seeds from an open chest in the same garden — no tablet or no seeds means empty beds.
Home and garden
View full-size image ↗Official promotional screenshot · © Lazy Bear Games / tinyBuild · Official media kit · Material credits
Unlock the technology
Zombie Gardening is a Farming technology that costs 60 green and 20 blue tech points.
Garden Improvement I has to be researched first.
The same unlock also opens the Lifting Crane, a separate building (8 Wooden beam, 3 Bronze Gear, 4 Iron Detail).
Build the Gardener Stand
The Gardener Stand is placed from the garden's blueprint desk and costs 4 Wooden Plank, 2 Bronze Detail and 6 Bronze Nails.
It is the post for a zombie gardener. You assign the zombie to the stand, not to individual crop beds.
Bronze Nails are the usual bottleneck at this point — see our bronze nails guide for a renewable supply.
An official build-mode screenshot of an outdoor work area. It does not show a Gardener Stand or crop tablets.
View full-size image ↗Official promotional screenshot · © Lazy Bear Games / tinyBuild · Official media kit · Material credits
Give the gardener a shovel
Like every zombie job, gardening is gated by mastery. A zombie at 0 Farming mastery will stand there.
Equip a shovel from the zombie's character sheet. A Bronze Shovel gives +2 mastery, which is generally enough to start.
Higher-level crops want more Farming mastery, so check the recipe level before assigning an exotic crop.
Crop tablets tell it what to grow
The gardener only works beds that have a crop tablet. One tablet assigns one crop to one bed.
Crops listed for tablets include wheat, beet, carrot, cabbage, pumpkin, onion and flax. Tablets are free to craft and can be swapped to change a bed's crop.
Beds without a tablet are ignored completely, which is the most common reason a garden stays half empty.
Seeds in, harvest out
Put a chest in the garden zone and stock it with seeds that match your tablets.
The gardener takes 4 seeds of the crop from an open chest, walks to the bed and plants it. When it ripens, the zombie harvests it and carries the crop back to the garden's open chests.
Workers do not move goods between zones, so the seed chest has to be inside the garden itself.
Why your gardener stopped
No shovel, or Farming mastery below the crop's requirement.
No crop tablet on the bed, or no matching seeds in an open chest in the garden.
The chests are full, so the harvest has nowhere to go — empty them or add storage.
The zombie has unspent points: inspect it now and then and put them into mastery upgrades.
