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 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 and you put it in the ground or you put it in soil and if it gets the 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 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 because 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 and 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.

Um 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 uh a seedling.

Um 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 start 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 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 uh 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 common way to describe it.

Um there's no flowers on our farm yet.

There are no blooms on our farm yet.

Uh 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.

Uh 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 you'll see a beautiful flower.

Fruit.

So, fruit is something that a tree will grow.

Um 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.

Um 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.

Uh but fruit is generally sweet.

Fruit is generally very very yummy.

Um 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 farmer's market, it starts.

Uh 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.

Uh very very very healthy for you to eat.

Um 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 wanna 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, 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.

Um we grow flowers.

I'm growing wheat.

We grow corn sometimes.

I also grow uh hay for cows and goats to eat.

So, this is the general term for humans.

Um 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 um a bunch of workers with knives cutting broccoli out of the field.

Uh lots of ways to harvest crops when they are ready uh to be um sold.

So, when you grow vegetables at home, we call that a garden.

So, some people have a small piece of land, a soil so that it's good for growing things and they might have a small garden.

Um if you grow flowers though, we usually call it a flower bed.

Um 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.