Here is some more ideas for petal gaining that would still be slow so people would buy petals anyways but this would allow people to actually f2p somewhat:
Petal quests. Something in the quests that were hard to do like farm 10,000 carrots but would re-roll every week/day each would give 5-25...
I recently joined the server only to find that it is literally somewhat p2p. Being the only way to get under 1,000 petals is from playtime and that's the only way to gain them f2p. For someone who wants a good p2w server to support the other f2p servers that does not seem that good at all even...