Free English Class! Topic: Plants! 🌱🌳🌻 (Lesson Only)

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.