I have amassed over 14,000 blue diamonds. Can I trade them for anything? Thanks.

If you can find someone to trade with then yes, you could trade them for gold.

Conditions apply to sprinkling though; the player sprinkling the gold would have to have puchased gold for real money in the past six months.  The person sprinkling the diamonds could only sprinkle lower levels unless they had also purchased gold.

If you can sprinkle, you'd buy the dusts then go to the other player's back wall and use the little "sprinkle gold" or "sprinkle diamonds" icons towards the top.

Be careful though.  The developers don't support this way of using the gifting mechanism so if anything goes wrong, they won't intervene.

And we aren't allowed to ask for trades on the forums :)

Be mindful that the candies go through your diamonds like crazy! So if you have not yet done them and plan to do them, save them :) I went through about 15k diamonds doing them!

Thanks folks!  :-)

Yeah, I think I used every bit of knowledge available not to grow extra candies (even the bud spoiler) and I am currently at 186 harvested candies. One more set to go, so I will probably end with about 200, which means 15 K diamonds. Might be not that many for somebody who is starting now, as I was almost finished with Violet when Rainbow Came and had to regrow most of the violet sets. Still, I would estimate 10 thousand diamonds would be a minimum needed for finishing Candies.

Anyway, the trading is really quite black market here, I do it sometimes as I have huge excess of diamonds and the occasional trade allows me to gift freely and use Superfood sometimes, but it is even questionable to ask for trades in your own garden, few years ago my trading post got reported and deleted (I am not sure if I had it in my status or at my back wall at that moment). It haven't happened again, but I am not sure what to think ever since.

I don't think it's against any rules to use your own garden to trade, but you certainly can't use the forums or the News page.  People do still do it, but always at their own risk because if someone won't (or can't) fulfil their end of the deal, Support can't help and you can be left out of pocket.

I harvested 254 candy plants, and I dread to think how many diamonds it cost me in dusting and buying the pots.  It was well in excess of 10,000; I started off with tens of thousands and ended up with less than ten thousand.  Hugely costly, made more so by having to do the beep-beeping things again when the rainbows were released as an afterthought.  At least people doing them now can go straight from one to the other, so it will cost an awful lot less.

I honestly don't know up to this date why my post was removed, but it was not at forum, it was years after that was banned. :)

It is often that way with new challenges, that Mike releases something just as the front runners are finishing and they are forced to repeat. I don't think it is bad, on the contrary, I think it is very clever, as it keeps us doubly busy while the slower folk is catching up. :) No complaints about being bored few weeks after a challenge comes.

It cost twice what it should have done, and that stuck in my craw for a long time.  I didn't like that, at all!

(I know it was my choice to do them - I so enjoyed them first time round, but they became a real chore second time through).

I hear you, believe me. It is just that it was not a new thing at all. I think the Pond challenges were the worst of all, they were released gradually during half a year and there were several additions, each of them always requiring a repeat of the previous one. (First myths, then rainbow of fish, then pondweed combos, after that frog breeding - and after some wasted their first batches of spawn, the bottom dwellers came, requiring all of those yet again). The gaps were big enough to always allow some to finish before the next set came.

And I still up to this day resent Ventus plants, because we had to grow them for some new wildlife or challenge, and the moment I harvested them, something new came requiring them again. I think it happened two times in a row, and at the end of it, I hoped I would never see another Ventus plant ever again. I don't even remember what it was, but I think the Pink Leopard was somewhat involved :D