Well, hello and welcome to this English lesson about plants. Plants are these wonderful things that grow outside, and sometimes we grow them inside. They make the world beautiful. In my opinion. Plants make things look natural. They make us feel good inside. And in addition to that, they also feed us. We eat all kinds of fruits and vegetables that plants provide for us. So plants are amazing and certainly a worthwhile English lesson for today. So welcome to this English lesson about plants seed. This is where you should start when talking about plants. Seeds, in my opinion, are one of the most amazing things in the world. It's this tiny little thing, and you put it in the ground and it turns into a tree or it turns into grass or it turns into a little bush. Seeds are these little dormant parts of the plant. When I say dormant, I mean a seed is kind of asleep, waiting to grow at some point. So when you have seeds, you basically have plants that will grow someday. Jen and I plant many, many seeds in the spring. We start our seeds in little seeding trays in our basement, and then eventually they all grow into plants. And seeds can be yummy, too. It's fun to eat sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds. There are many types of seeds in the world that are very yummy to eat as well. So the verb to plant, this is what we use when we talk about putting a seed in the ground. This person is planting seeds. Jen will plant many seeds in the spring. Farmers in our area will plant a lot of seeds in the ground later this spring. So when you take a seed that's dormant, you put it in the ground or you put it in soil. And if it gets the right, right things, which I'm going to talk about in a moment, it will start to grow. But the verb we use is to plant. And you put it into the soil or the ground. You could even say the earth. Generally, we plant seeds into soil in our seeding trays. If you are putting seeds into a pot, you would probably say you're putting it into soil. If you're outside, you plant seeds in the soil or in the ground. You could use either word to describe it. But that is what will make seeds come out of their dormancy and start to grow, to germinate. So once a seed starts to grow, it sends out usually a little root and a little stem. So we say then that it has germinated, the seed absorbs water, then it gets to a point where it will start to grow. And we call that germination. The verb is to germinate. We hope that when we plant seeds, they will germinate. It's nice to see seeds start to grow. It's nice to see them germinate and start to send down roots. And send a stem up. And the verb is to germinate. And we also refer to this as a sprout. So a sprout is something that might be familiar to you, but we eat sprouts. Um, you can eat bean sprouts, you can eat sunflower sprouts, you can eat alfalfa sprouts. A sprout is when the seed has germinated and it's sent out. Either maybe just a root, maybe a root and a little bit of a stem, but usually just that first root, and then you are able to eat it. Maybe in a salad or something else. Very, very yummy. I like sprouts. Um, jen used to do more sprouts in our kitchen. We had a sprouting jar. We should probably do that more because sprouts are very, very healthy. It's also a fun word to say. Why don't you say it right now? Sprout. It's a fun English word to say. So, as I mentioned, plants have different parts. The root is the part of the plant that grows down into the soil. So generally, when a seed germinates, it will send out its first root, and that root will go down into the soil so that the plant can get water, other nutrients from the soil, in order to grow. So we call it a root. I think it has a couple other pronunciations, but I say root roots are pretty cool. They actually make the soil healthier as well, because they go down and they break up the soil. There are some crops that we grow just to make the soil better, because the roots help make good soil to emerge. So when a plant germinates and sends its first root down, and then it sends its first stem up, eventually it comes out of the ground. And the verb we use is to emerge. Plants emerge from the ground. When I plant crops in my big field, I'm always eager for the seeds to emerge. I'm looking forward to seeing the plants. Sorry, the seeds don't emerge. I'm looking forward to seeing the plants emerge from. From the ground. It is a very exciting time when you see things. We could also use the verb to come up. So it's fun to see plants come up or to emerge from the ground. And then we call that a seedling. When a plant first starts to grow, that tiny little plant, that first little stem, and a few leaves that come out of the ground, we like, we call that a seedling jen in the basement, because we grow flowers on our flower farm. She has large trays. She plants seeds in the soil in the tray. Eventually it will germinate, and then the seed will emerge, and then we'll have a little seedling. After a day or two, it'll put up a stem and then a couple little leaves, and we'll have these cute little seedlings. So the difference between emerge and germinate? Germinate means the seed starts to grow underneath the ground. And when you say the seed, when you say the plant emerges, it means it comes out of the ground. They are very similar. But scientifically, germination would be the seed takes in water and sends out its first root. So you might not see it yet, and then eventually it will emerge, and you will see it starts to grow above the ground. That would be the little difference between to emerge and to germinate. So parts of the plant, the stem is just that piece that doesn't have anything else happening. It just connects the bottom of the plant to the first leaf. Sorry. Just have a look. Oh, bumping my microphone. Just have a look here. This is the stem of this plant. If you go far enough up, you will have a leaf, but that is the stem. With a tree, you might actually call the main part the trunk, or you actually call the main part the trunk, and then you might say stems. But usually we say branches when we're talking about a tree. Leaves, of course, or leaf in the singular. These are the green, usually green parts of a plant, sometimes yellow or red or other colors. This is the part of the plant that the plant makes in order to capture sunlight. And I won't go into the details of what plants do with sunlight, but they use sunlight in order to get energy to grow. So leaves are the part of the plant where sunlight can hit and the plant can grow and be strong and produce food or produce branches or produce. Let me see. I'm thinking fruit or anything else that a plant produces. This is a bud. So a bud is anything that looks like this that will become a flower or a leaf. Okay. Generally, a bud becomes a flower, but our trees right now have all little buds on them, and those buds on a maple tree will open and become leaves on the tree. When we see a bud on one of our flowering plants, that bud usually opens and becomes a flower. So it's like the stage before leaves or the stage before flowers is a bud. Then, of course, you have flowers. This is a beautiful dahlia, or you have this which is a flower as well, but we might call it a bloom. This is a beautiful peony. You might hear the word flower more often. People buy flowers. People love to smell flowers. It's the colorful part of a plant that humans are very attracted to, and bees are also very attracted to them as well. Bees love flowers so that they can go around and land on them. And there's things with pollen and later making honey that happen. But we can also call it a bloom. You know, oh, there's lots of nice flowers in that field. There's lots of nice blooms in that field. Although flower would be the more common way to describe it. There's no flowers on our farm yet. There are no blooms on our farm yet. Those will be coming in a few weeks. Okay, that's not totally true. There are daffodils blooming, and there will be tulips blooming in a few weeks. So notice that's a verb as well, to bloom. So when you say the flowers are going to bloom, it means they're going to go from just having a bud to opening up, and. And you will see a beautiful flower, fruit. So, fruit is something that a tree will grow. Other plants have fruit as well, but the most common types of fruit would be things like apples, peaches, pears. I think dates are probably a fruit. I think even strawberries are considered a fruit. They don't grow on a tree, though. They grow on a little bush in the ground. But fruit is generally sweet. Fruit is generally very, very yummy. But if I go to market in the summer, one of the things I want to buy is fresh fruit in our area in the summer, as you go to market, like a farmers market, it starts usually the season starts at the end of May, and the first fruit at market can sometimes be apples, but they're apples from the year before that are coming out of storage. So they're not like, from the tree in May or June, but we usually start to see fruit come in around July. We have peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums. Um, eventually, we do have apples and pears in the fall. Fruit is very, very yummy. And that, those are some examples. Vegetables are basically any other part of a plant that you eat. In fact, because this isn't a science lesson, I don't have to be specific. There are some things that we say are vegetables in the kitchen that maybe, if you looked it up online, is actually a fruit. But this, to me, would be, these are all vegetables. I'm not sure if tomatoes would actually be considered a fruit or not. I don't want to get into a big argument, but vegetables are things like spinach or lettuce or broccoli or cauliflower. Those are all vegetables. Very, very, very healthy for you to eat. Everyone should eat a lot of vegetables. In fact, there are a lot of different ways that people explore to be healthy. One of the best things you can do is just eat more vegetables. I don't want to go into the details of why that's good, but vegetables are just good for you. Very good. When you grow a lot of one kind of plant, we usually call it a crop. So right now, I have a wheat crop in my field. I have a over 30 acre field, and I'm growing wheat. Last year, the crop I had in that field was soybeans. Next year, the crop will either be corn or soybeans. So when you drive out in the countryside and you see wheat fields or rice fields, we call those crops. They're growing a crop in order to harvest the crop and to sell it to people. So this is a corn crop, by the way, if you're not familiar with it, we call it corn. It might be called maize. In other countries, when a farmer has a crop, they are growing that crop. Okay. And we can use crop even more broadly, like Jen has a nice crop of flowers. We grow flowers. I'm growing wheat. We grow corn sometimes I also grow hay for cows and goats to eat. So this is the general term for humans planting seeds, allowing them to grow and harvesting them. You just use the verb to grow. And then when they're all done growing, you harvest them. So this is called a combine. In my part of Canada, we call this machine a combine. It is a large machine that can drive, and it takes the crop into itself and takes the part out, usually the seed, and puts it in the bin on the top, and then the rest of the plant, all of the stems and leaves go out the back. But there are many ways to harvest. You can harvest by hand. You can harvest with a big machine like this combine. You can harvest with maybe just a bunch of workers with knives cutting broccoli out of the field. Lots of ways to harvest crops when they are ready to be sold. So when you grow vegetables at home, we call that a garden. So some people have a small piece of land, small area in their yard, where they improve the soil so that it's good for growing things, and they might have a small garden. If you grow flowers, though, we usually call it a flower bed, I'm not sure why. So this is a garden. This is a flower bed. But you could also have a flower garden. So the words are kind of interchangeable. I think flower bed would refer to a smaller area, but you can also use the verb to garden to talk about this hobby of growing things. So when you garden, it doesn't mean you're growing food to sell. It doesn't mean you're growing plants to sell. It doesn't mean you're growing flowers to harvest and make bouquets and sell to people. It means that you enjoy being outside and you enjoy growing things. So someone might say, what are your hobbies? And you might say, oh, I like to garden. I like growing little plants outside. I have a small vegetable garden. I have a few flower beds around my property, and I like to grow different types of plants. So when we use the verb to garden, we're talking about the hobby of gardening. So here is a vegetable garden. So I mentioned garden earlier, and I mentioned vegetables a few times, but you could just specify and say, I have a vegetable garden. Um, you don't grow fruit, usually in a garden, although some of the things you're growing are probably fruit. Usually you would grow fruit on trees in an orchard. Uh, and then here's a flower garden. Sorry, I must have forgot that I had these slides here. So a flower garden is, uh, a bigger place than a flower bed, where you grow a wide variety of flowers. A person who grows lots of plants to sell is generally called a farmer. So Jen and I grow a lot of flowers to sell them. We are flower farmers. I am a farmer. Jen is a farmer. I also grow lots of wheat. Jen and I have a large field of wheat. We are farmers. So this is a term we use for someone who grows a lot of plants. And their purpose for growing the plants isn't to eat them themselves. Their purpose isn't to look at the beautiful flowers. Their purpose is to sell whatever they harvest. I'm going back using the word harvest. So a farmer will plant crops, a farmer will grow crops. A farmer's farmer will harvest crops, and a farmer will sell crops. If we go inside, you might have house plants. So a house plant is a small plant that you grow inside because you like how it looks. So you might have a few plants like this one in different rooms. It's nice to see green plants in a house. People mentioned that they miss my plant. They wish I still had my plant here. Plants just make humans feel better. There's a nice feeling inside, like you have a nice feeling when you see plants around. So a house plant is a plant that you grow in a house. So there's crops. There's plants that we grow because we like growing them. Plants we grow because we're trying to produce food or flowers. But there are also plants that would be called a weed. A weed is an annoying plant that grows in a spot where you don't want it to. Jen and I have rows of flowers in our field, and weeds grow amongst the flowers or among the flowers. You can use either word, and we have to go and pull the weeds out. This is a dandelion. There are a variety of weeds in my part of the world. I'm sure there are different weeds in your part of the world, but if you'd like to have a nice, beautiful flower bed, if you nice. If you want a nice vegetable garden, you need to go out and make sure that you pull the weeds out. And in English, by the way, we often have the same noun as verb, so I can go weed the garden? Okay. If there are weeds in the garden, I like to weed the garden, so I can use the same word. There's a noun form and a verb form of that word that I can use. Weeds are annoying, by the way. They will grow pretty much anywhere, and it's kind of frustrating sometimes. Nutrients. So let's talk about what plants need to grow. Plants need a variety of things to grow, but one of the things they need, um, they need nutrients. Nutrients refer to all of the things in the soil that plants take in through their roots along with water in order to grow. They need things like magnesium and calcium and nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium. There are a number of things that need to be in the soil. I think they even need some sulfur, um, that plants need in order to be healthy in order to grow fertilizer. So fertilizer generally refers to three main things, and that is nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium. Those are the three major fertilizers that plants need. Each one helps the plant in a different way. When I grow crops in my field, I need to make sure there's enough fertilizer in the ground. If there isn't, we put more fertilizer on. My wheat needs nitrogen soon because it's primarily a grass. Nitrogen is the most important fertilizer for it. But, yeah, lots of times people will put fertilizer down before they grow something so that it grows strong and it grows healthy. They might use manure, which is, of course, just a very natural fertilizer. There's no other way to say this. Manure is a mixture of strawberries, poop from animals. So if you have sheep, you probably put straw in the sheep pen. Straw is just dried wheat or oat stems, and then they poop, and then the mixture will decompose a little bit and it becomes very, very good fertilizer. So horse manure, cow manure, sheep manure, goat manure, it's all very, very good for the soil. In fact, better than fertilizer in some ways, because fertilizer adds the chemicals that are needed. Manure adds the chemicals that are needed, but also what we call organic matter. All of the little pieces of, you know, old plants in the manure are good for the soil as well. And then there's compost. I don't know if you have a compost bin. A compost bin is a place where you put kitchen scraps so that they can decompose and it becomes a very rich mulch or fertilizer as well. So we put all of our kitchen scraps, like little pieces of celery that we cut off the end leaves that we don't eat. Like, if you eat the stem but not the leaf, when you buy carrots, the green part of the carrot we put into the compost so that will slowly turn into really, really nice nutrient source for growing plants. Oh, and by the way, manure does smell, but if it's very, very old manure, it doesn't smell very bad. So it's good to let manure sit for about a year, and it turns a dark, dark brown, and it doesn't smell as much. So plants need water, lots of water. They get water in a variety of ways, but certainly rain is probably one of the most natural ways. Um, right now it's raining outside, so Jen and I will be, uh, we will not be working outside tomorrow, on Saturday, because it's supposed to rain then as well. But, uh, plants need water. It's probably, for most crops, the most important. Uh, we call them crop inputs sometimes, but it's the most important thing that they need, uh, for sure, sunlight. So plants need sunlight to grow. The sun is amazing. It provides this light energy that comes, and we like sitting in the sun and staying warm in the sun. But plants actually need the sun to grow in the winter. In Canada, most plants are dormant. They go into dormancy, and they don't grow. They just wait for spring to come. And once we start to get rain and once the sun starts to shine, our lawn, our grass starts to turn green, the trees start to leaf out, and you start to see everything start to grow. I'm not going to go into any details, but plants need the energy from the sun in order to survive and live. And then there's also something called pollination. In order for plants to reproduce, they need to be in contact with other plants. This can happen by plants just blowing past each other in the wind. Or there might be insects, like bees, that fly from flower to flower. Sometimes plants just release pollen into the air and it blows around with the wind. But sometimes they need a bee to kind of come and take the pollen from one plant to another plant. By the way, plant pollen is a source of allergies. Like, there's one part of the summer where my nose is stuffed up all the time because I think I'm allergic to one of the plants that's sending out pollen at that time. When you water, you can water artificially, so you can water using a sprinkler. A sprinkler is just something that shoots water around on plants. You might water using a watering can. So you might fill up something like this. It has a spout and a handle, and you can go and put water. Usually if you're watering a vegetable garden, though, you would probably use a sprinkler. If you're watering a few potted plants, you might use a watering can. And then if you are using a sprinkler, you might need a garden hose. So this is a type of hose that we use outside in our gardens. You connect it to a tap, and then you can hook a sprinkler up to the other end or something else, and then you turn the tap on and water will come out. And then when you're done, you can wrap up or roll up the garden hose. Sometimes our dogs chew our garden hoses. That makes Jen quite angry because garden hoses don't work when they have holes in it from the dogs chewing on them. Um, if you grow plants in pots, you will probably buy potting soil. So we buy potting soil because it's a really good kind of soil to start seeds in. So Jen will fill pots or trays with potting soil, and then she will use that to start her plants. So it's a type of soil that you buy at a store that you can use to grow plants and houseplants usually are in potting soil. Weeds are annoying, and sometimes you need to hoe to get the weeds. Again, this is a hoe, and you use a hoe to hoe. So I can go buy a hoe and then I can go out in the field and I can hoe the weeds. Okay. This gentleman here has a pretty heavy duty hoe. When you say something's heavy duty, it means it looks like it's built really, really well. But yes, weeds are probably the most annoying part of farming in all respects. Pruners. So you can, they're kind of on these gloves here. I probably should have chosen a better picture. Pruners are anything you use to cut stems or branches off of a plant. There are small pruners, we would call these hand pruners. There are larger pruners that you can use as well that we might call loppers, where you can kind of, or hedge trimmers. But pruners are used to remove part of a plant from the plant itself. And again, you can use the verb to prune. When you're talking about pruners, you can go prune an apple tree using pruners. Wheelbarrow. Very handy tool. One wheel on the front, two handles on the back. You can fill it with anything you want, and it just makes it easier than carrying things. So you can go out and you can fill the wheelbarrow with manure, and then you can wheel the manure somewhere and dump it. Okay, so a few more verbs there. You can fill the wheelbarrow with manure. You can then wheel the wheelbarrow to a spot in your garden. You could say, oh, wheel it over here, dump it right here. And then you dump what's in the wheelbarrow. This is one of the best things ever invented in the world, the wheelbarrow. It has made the lives of gardeners and farmers way easier for so long. You can carry in a wheelbarrow, you can put five times more stuff and easily move it. It's so cool how that works. Such a simple, simple thing, but so, so handy. You might have a shovel or a spade. Technically, there is a difference between a shovel and a spade, but we use the same word usually. Um, in my part of Canada, at least. Um, if you need to dig, if you need to move dirt around, if you need to make a hole or dig a hole in the ground, you would use a shovel or a spade in order to do that. And then to finish up, there are plants that are annuals and there are perennials. So an annual is a plant that needs to grow from seed each season or each year. Sunflowers, this is a type of flower we grow. We plant seeds every year, and then they regrow or, and then they grow from seed. A perennial, though, comes back on its own every year. So peonies are perennials, this is called, these are rudbeckia, but they're also called something else. I can't remember right now. These are perennials at least most years in Canada, if it's really cold in the winter, sometimes they're not. Oh, this is echinacea, I think. So an annual, you grow from seed every year, and a perennial just comes up by itself. Like peonies was the one that, I think peony to me, is the best flower in the world because it's a perennial. It's beautiful. It smells beautiful. People love buying them. So for me, who grows peonies to sell, I like that as well. So. But, yeah, annual from seed, every year, perennial comes up by, by itself.
