Special Delivery Box

Next to your Market Stand you'll find the Special Delivery Box. You can send gifts to 100 friends and the gifts are randomized.

Tips:
Go back to the Special Delivery Box later on in the game, and you might be able to send more gifts than the initial 100.
Don't harvest the Special Delivery Box until you're sure you have room for additional items, such as salt, sugar and water.
The Special Delivery Box can only hold a maximum of 15 gifts so you need to empty it when it reaches that number.

Free Gifts

Free Gifts are sent to all of your friends that play Farmville 2 and you find them in the top bar next to the play tab. A lot of people don't use this feature and it's a shame. If all my friends sent me water I'd get several hundred extra water per day. (Mind-boggling I know.)

Most people agree that water is the best gift, some think fertilizer is better. I've never come across anyone who think the other options are worth it.

Tips: The gifts will end up in the top part of your Inbox. Don't click on those links if you already have the maximum of water/fertilizer or you'll lose it. You still need to use it within a day so don't forget to go back and click the links.
("Accept and Send" does not mean that you send your friend water too, they'll get coins.)

Groves

Lvl 1 Matching Grove

Groves are bought with coins and favors and there is a limit to how many you can buy (45). The groves could earlier be bought with coins and then you had your friends help build them. Finding a neighbor farm with more groves than you can buy today, does not necessarily mean that they are cheating.

Groves use less water and give larger crops. Making matching groves, with one kind of tree, is even better. Heirloom groves produces most, and give large prized fruits for the State/County Fair.

Tips: Put a grove close to the entrance of your farm to optimize the odds of your neighbors clicking on them. Also put a couple of single trees by it. When you see that a neighbor will click on a single tree, you move it into a grove. Water, fertilize and then let the neighbor go to work. The neighbor will then speed grow the whole grove. This does work with water and fertilizer too of course, but speed grow is more valuable than the other two.

Warning!: Elder trees are the worst to have in a grove. They take more water than heirloom trees and does not drop random Pruning Shears as ordinary trees do. The game will warn you about the first elder tree you come across during harvest, and you'll be offered to sell or store it, but there can be more elder trees in your groves. Check the groves regularly and remove them.  Store the elder trees if you have all the Pruning Shears you can hold, and sell them later when you need more.

Bees

Bee Box

 The Bee Box is built with the help of your friends (as always). Then you harvest crops to fill it with pollen. When it's full you harvest the Bee Box for honey and honey combs. Once you've collected enough honey combs you'll get a Honey Bee Hive (5 in total). The Bee Box stays on your farm and you collect honey for the Honey Bee Hive as well as some recipes. You put honey in the Honey Bee Hive (once a day) and use the bees to fertilize.

Tips: Use the bees to fertilize fields rather than plots. The bees will fertilize 4 plots while a field holds 5 plots.

Honey Bee Hive

Warning! Bee hives does not count when you need to fertilize things for some quests.

Animal Barn

Animal Barn.

A building bought with coins and favors. When first bought it needs to be filled with all your water troughs and you shady trough. (Some report that they had to buy additional troughs to be able to use the Animal Barn.)

The Animal Barn is the building with the most bugs at this point. Earlier it stole all feed when fed through a feeding trough. That seems to be fixed now. Now it freezes in two different ways.

1) It freezes when an animal becomes prized. You can then see a sign that you have hungry animals in it, but when you go there it says that you have 0 hungry animals.
Fix: Open the Animal Barn and super feed the animals once. No feed will be taken from you and the prized animals will leave the barn. OR, do as Zynga suggest add an adult hungry animal to the barn. Remove an animal if you have to. Then feed the Animal Barn. (I have not tried out Zyngas solution.)

2) It freezes and you can't do anything with it.
Fix: Reload the page. Feed. Reload again. Repeat until it works again. Zynga claims this has been fixed, but I still experience the problem.

The Animal Barn also spits out animals that start walking around, sometimes prized other times adult animals. You can't put the prized back in the barn or into the pasture. Feed them and they will go to pasture. You can put the adult animals back into the barn, but they will be thrown out again the next time you feed an animal in the barn. Wait until they are hungry, or speed feed them, and they will become prized with one feeding. You might have to manually move them to pasture.

State Fair ain't Fair (Either)

The cheaters stood out in the old County Fair, but in the State Fair they come with bells and whistles. As long as you are competing against cheaters you have absolutely Zero chance of winning the trophy.

This is how it works. Each week you compete against a random set of people, not your neighbors. "Based on Medal/Trophy tier, County Fair points and player level." According to Zynga.

Great! Now you can get away from the cheaters that have been annoying you in the County Fair, right? Wrong.

Once you have competed against the random people, (odds are that some are cheaters), you are weighed against your neighbors. Yepp, the same old cheaters. To get the League Trophy you have to beat them too. Impossible of course. Now the cheaters have the best spots in the neighbors bar and will get the most visits.

Brilliant Zynga! That's exactly what we need, people helping the cheaters instead of those who struggle to play within the rules.

I competed against the strangers, two have over 1.3 million points. Yes, you read that right, million. Using prized shovels x10, certificates, speed grow and a lot of time I landed on 3rd place with 279649 points.

My conclusion is that it will cost too much money to compete with the cheaters. It's simply not worth it. Now there's only two choices left. Forget about the State Fair all together or join the cheaters.

EDIT 14 JUNE 2015:
Zynga claims that they have listened to the critique and that they are making changes that will make the game more fair. What changes they are making is unknown to me at this point and it still remains to see if the game becomes any fairer. I did get one ruby shovel when they made the announcement. One shovel for 24 hours to make up for weeks of struggle. I'm not impressed.

Prized Animal Clone Bug

Make sure that your farm is full with adult animals, then move a prized animal from a prized animal shed to the pasture. An Animal Crowding Alert pops up and to the right of it, the game notifies you that your prized animal has been put in your inventory. That's a clone.

Now open the pasture and move the prized animal back to its shed. The message pops up again.

Go to the inventory and you'll find two clones of the animal you moved.

I've used this bug to fill my prized animal sheds with the best prized animals I have on my farm. Some that gives more prized goods and others that give higher XP.The bug can also be used to fill the pasture so that you can get fuel pump upgrades and keeper points in the journal.

Discounts on Farm Upgrades!

I started my oldest farm when Farmville 2 was just a baby, many years ago. Back then we bought groves with coin and had our friends help build them, just like any other building. I started collecting groves on a big scale since I use trees to make coins and get XP. The problem is that I couldn't upgrade all my groves when they changed the groves function.

Until today. =)

Using the discounts I can upgrade all groves, and I've luckily collected a lot of favors to spend.

Co-op Power Hours Bug

I bought a Co-op Power Hour pack for my co-op, or so I thought. It turns out that I'm the only one that benefited from it. A Google search let me know that this is a bug that has been there since 2014!