I haven't gotten this far yet to verify, but according to the wiki Mai-Lynn Oshiro starts with 75 gardening when you first get her. Wouldn't it make more sense to just wait and grab her for gardening? You could still put some other slave on gardening temporarily, but Mai-Lynn Oshiro also gets special abilities specific to gardening:That's from a recent review, and I'd like to add my experience. I did the same thing with my Juno and 693 days in she's at 107 Gardening.
I'm of two minds on this subject. First is to agree with the spirit of the reviewer, that's just too fucking long to have to wait, and a massive investment when you consider that after 80 it takes about half of Juno's day.
The other is that someday there might be on the order of 25 or so slaves and perhaps nearly as many NPCs/Mercs. There might well be new elements of the game like politics and possibly vying for control of Ikaanos somehow. It may well be that to do the entire thing will take a thousand or two days.
Still, it looks like it's going to take more than a thousand days for her to get there in the above run. That's probably too long.
Assigning Mai-Lynn to your fully upgraded Garden will now provide you with an additional 2 rations per day. She'll also use gardening tools more efficiently.