Forget about decorating in the very early levels and plant as many crops as you have room for and can afford, you need as much mana coming in as possible early on.
Use the bonus mana feature (accessed via Options menu on the right of your gaming window - cog icon), it looks horrible (the stars and balls) but if you click on them very fast you will get more and more mana whilst gathering crops, trees and artifacts, you can always disable it once you are ready to slow down a bit, or at any other time come to that.
Visit your neighbours each day to clean their kingdom and enchant their crops, this gives some mana but more importantly the kingdom cleaning gives XP as well.
Collect bonuses from the news feed, mana bonuses are not usually popular and you can use the mana to buy items that give you XP (plus buying any item gives some XP) as mentioned earlier. Also keep an eye out for bonuses that are worth a lot to sell, the Green Mushroom Tables that were in the last batch of Mystery Gifts were worth 1500 mana each to sell.
Make sure you visit your kingdom at least once a day to get your Daily Player Gift and don't forget to visit the Wishing Well and collect your Daily Fortune, there are lots of things available from these that you can keep, plant (trees) or sell for mana.
Do Quests when they are available as these always give XP as well as mana and/or a gift of some kind, newer players should be wary of the beginners quests though as you can end up spending more than you gain, FK appear to have taken this on board with the more recent Quests (mostly) at least.
You can cram a lot of trees into a small space (especially those like the silver and gold leaf tree with narrow trunks) and these are perfect for constant mana flow and never bewitch. I used to have hundreds in the earlier levels of the game.
By Nikki Hayes
