With that setting enabled in the gui, underground plants take 4 seasons to grow and aboveground crops take 2 seasons. If you enable crops to be planted for each season in the same plot, then it seems nothing will grow.
Excuse me, this is interesting.
So planting the same thing for all seasons is a bad habit ? It's better to have different things for every season ?
Or you was just talking about a "feeling" that things never grows ?
In the beginning of a game, I usually do 1-2 medium-sized-plot for every plant type and then set the same plant type for all seasons.
Some seasons have more plants, so I just do 2 types for that ones.
That's what I do too under regular farming rules.
But under the harder farming rules, plants take longer to grow.
You would build the plot, and then set it for "Plump Helmets" in Spring. Set NOTHING for Summer, Fall, and Winter or it will replant and reset the timer. This means that for a full year, that plot is tied up growing one thing. You've also got to wait longer for food. They weren't kidding when they called it "harder farming".
I find the best approach to be to set 2 plots for each underground plant and stagger the season, so you would have one plot that plants plump helmets in the spring and another one that plants plump helmets in the fall, and so forth and so on for cave wheat, pig tails, or whatever else you want to grow.
Because of the 4 season delay, it means that you plant in spring and you harvest in the next spring. If your brewer is slow, or you time something wrong (maybe not enough containers come harvest time to hold the drinks), then you won't have produced enough seeds to plant that season and now you'll miss out on an ENTIRE YEAR of planting. Which is disastrous.
It all depends upon how you want to play that game, which is the awesome factor of Masterwork. When I play heavy in the fortress defense with lots of sieges, I don't usually want to fiddle with food so I turn on easy farming. If I'm going for a "survival fortress" or doing megaprojects, I might turn on the hard farming in order to increase the survival aspect. If I'm really sadistic, I'll do both at the same time.