Learn English as I Give a Tour of Our Flower Farm!

Hi, Bob, the Canadian here.

Welcome to this English lesson about plants and flowers.

I'll be honest.

It's mostly going to be about flowers because Jen and I live

on a flower farm.

In this video, I will teach you some words and phrases

that you can use when you're talking

about plants and flowers.

As I take you through a little tour

of how we go from planting seeds

to harvesting and selling flowers on our flower farm.

(upbeat music)

Well hey, welcome to this English lesson

about plants and flowers.

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helps you learn just a little bit more English.

Well, these beautiful flowers were all originally seeds.

One of the first things we do on our farm every spring

is we order seeds.

The seeds are the small, tiny things that plants grow from.

I'll see if I can show you one.

It might not focus on it.

But a seed is something that you plant in the ground.

And eventually when the seed has some water

and the seed has some warmth from sunlight,

it will germinate when a seed germinates,

that's when it first starts to grow.

So one of the first things we do

is we choose what flowers we want to grow

and then Jen will order them.

In fact, we have boxes like this filled with seeds.

These are simply the seeds that start with the letter A

up to the seeds that start with the letter D.

On our farm though, we don't plant our seeds in the ground.

We start almost all of our seeds in trays.

This is a special plastic tray

that has tiny spots for each seed.

We fill it with a special kind of soil called potting soil,

which is really rich and just a good soil

for starting seeds in.

So we put one seed in every hole and then eventually they

will germinate and you will have something like this.

This is a tray of scabiosa and over here,

we have a beautiful tray of sunflowers.

So we don't plant our seeds in the ground.

We plant them in trays and then once they're big enough,

we transplant them.

Once the plants are big enough,

we will transplant them into the flower bed

where we want them to grow.

The English word transplant means

when you take a plant from one place where it's growing

and you plant it in a different place.

So we have plants growing in trays,

and we transplant them into the ground.

After the flowers are transplanted,

there's really two things that they need.

They need lots of sunshine,

and we're getting plenty of that today.

And they need water.

Our hope is that it rains a lot.

Usually in our area, it rains from time to time,

but sometimes it's not enough water

for the flowers and plants to thrive.

It's not enough water for them to grow well.

So we need to irrigate.

This is what we would call a sprinkler,

trying to get it in focus for you.

A sprinkler is something that turns

and it shoots water out while it turns.

We also use what's called drip line.

Drip line is a type of hose with tiny holes in it.

So water can drip out at a constant rate.

So either it rains or we use the sprinklers

or we use the drip line so that the flowers

can get all of the water that they need.

And then we just hope for a lot of sunny days.

When it comes to watering plants,

there are two things that are quite helpful.

One is the fact that we live on a river.

So we have plenty of water when we need to water the plants.

And the second thing that helps

keep all of our flowers watered is this

electric pump down here.

This pump runs a lot during the dry parts of the summer,

and it really helps keep all of our flowers happy

and growing well.

At this part of the lesson,

I think we should look at some of the actual flowers

because I know many of you want to see what they look like

and they're beautiful.

We grow several different kinds of flowers on the farm,

but our main crops, the main flowers that we grow

would be flowers like lisianthus.

We like lisianthus because it grows really well

in our soil and it grows really well in our climate.

And it produces a number of different colors.

So we have light pinks. We have light yellows.

We have a pure white lisianthus.

It's just a beautiful flower.

And every stem has more than one flower on it.

That's really cool as well,

because it just creates a very beautiful flower.

We also grow Sweet William.

Sweet William is an excellent flower as well.

We like Sweet William because it lasts

a really long time in a vase.

That's very important when you are a flower farmer.

You want your flowers to last a long time

after a customer buys them.

We also grow sunflowers.

We also grow zinnias.

You'll notice, though, that in the sunflower patch,

you don't see a lot of sunflowers because we actually

harvest the sunflower as it's opening.

So when you see big fields of sunflowers,

those aren't for bouquets.

They are growing those sunflowers for seed,

but ours are just slightly closed.

I did find one though, that was a little bit open

and we grow a lot of zinnias.

Zinnias, as well, are a flower that produces

an enormous range of color.

There's orange, there's yellow, there's red, there's purple.

It's so nice to have a flower that grows well

and also produces such a variety of color.

And then we also grow dahlias,

but unfortunately it's only the beginning of August.

So our dahlia patch is very green.

You can see that we have it all set up in nice rows.

Every row has drip line to keep the dahlia plants watered.

And we put up the strings

so that dahlias is don't fall over on a windy day,

but we'll have to wait a few weeks

before the dahlias start to bloom.

Again, we grow a wide range of flowers on our farm

and things besides flowers as well.

But those would probably be the main ones that we grow.

After several weeks of beautiful, sunshiny days

and lots of rain or water,

the flowers will bloom and they will be ready to harvest.

In order to harvest or cut flowers, we use pruners.

We look for flowers where the blooms

are the right size to sell,

and then we will cut them with the pruner.

There's one right here.

As you can see, I'm slowly harvesting

some beautiful pink zinnias.

This is the door to our flower cooler.

Our cooler is a large room that we keep extra cold

so that the flowers stay good

while we're waiting to sell them.

Let's go in and have a quick look.

The next thing we need to do after we harvest our flowers

or after we cut our flowers is we need

to take the flowers like these lisianthus here,

and we need to combine them with other flowers

to make a bouquet.

So a bouquet is when you arrange flowers in a way

that's very pleasing to the eye.

You arrange them in a way that's very visually pleasing

and that is called a bouquet.

Here, you can see one of our large bouquets.

We call this a sunflower bouquet.

Now you get to see some sunflowers and over here,

we have some of our smaller bouquets.

These bouquets come in a nice little vase or jar,

and you can see this bouquet has a lot of zinnias in it.

So one of the last things we do before we sell our flowers

is we spend a lot of time taking the stems

and making bouquets.

The last thing we do with our flowers

is we take them to market so we can sell them.

So every week we load up our van

and Jen goes to our local farmer's market.

A farmer's market is a market that's usually outside

during the spring, summer and fall.

And it's a place where farmers

sell the things that they grow.

At our farmers' market,

there are farmers that sell vegetables,

there are farmers that sell fruit

and there are farmers, like us, that sell flowers.

So each week we go.

Jen sets up our booth or stall.

It has two different names

and she displays all of the bouquets

so that people can decide if they want to buy one.

Every bouquet has a price on it.

And just so you know, in Canada,

when you see a price on something at a market,

you usually pay that price.

We don't often negotiate or discuss

the price of something in Canada.

I know in some countries it's very common.

In Canada, it is not.

You pay the price that you see on the product.

Anyways, thank you so much

for watching this little English lesson.

I know it was more of a tour of my farm

than a pure English lesson,

but I hope you were able to learn

some new English words and phrases along the way.

If you did, please give me a thumbs up.

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