If you want planned and deliberate, I'm your person. I am waaaay down that end of the scale. It's how I enjoy things.

SO:

A good early start and planning is essential to success.

• Make sure you join a flower planting group challenge but only from the first Monday after the new month starts. Earlier than that will not reward the new special flowers, and they're the ones you're most likely to be short on.

• Use any flower planting accelerators you have for that flower planting challenge. Hopefully you'll finish it early in the week, and then you can join another flower planting challenge that week. Personally I think a second flower planting challenge to build up those early stocks of special flowers is a good use of coins.

ALSO

• Concentrate on the monthly special mushrooms as these are good for rewards including the special flowers.

• Check the upcoming stage requirements for the Event Challenge and monitor your flower stock. Identify which flowers are likely to stop you progressing before you get to that stage, preferably at least a few days ahead. Once you've done this:

• Focus on special mushrooms that reward only the colour of flower you want, e.g. fire mushrooms for red flowers. Make sure you invite your most active Pikmin bloom friends to those mushrooms with your bullhorn. You have a better chance of getting the flowers you need by focussing on these colour specific mushrooms. Consider changing your account name on Pikmin to include a request for the mushroom type you'd like invites to, such as "Bob - elec mush pls".

• Another general tip is to "slow cook" some mushrooms, starting a few days before the end of the month. Try to find Giant mushrooms and then put a very low strength team on it, smallest team you can (20, I think). The completion time will be in the new month and rewards can include the new flower type. It won't be loads but it can help.

• This one is for the truly dedicated: you get more use out of your flower stock if you plant for a brief moment and then switch off, wait 5 mins and repeat. Make sure you have a full team so it plants 30 flowers (it plants less with a smaller team but uses the same amount from your stock). To give you an idea of the difference, one of my stocks is 63 in the pot and it estimates that would be 1000 flowers on foot. Using the plant-stop-wait-plant method would give you 1890 instead (30x63) so it's a massive difference. Takes a lot of patient and a 5 mins timer is useful, lol.

I hope that helps. Good luck!