Vocabulary for the Garden: Garden Fresh
This entry is the beginning of the “Garden Fresh” series. The other posts in this series are:
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We say that something (usually a fruit or vegetable) is ‘garden fresh’ when it comes directly from the garden. The only tomatoes I like, for example, are garden fresh tomatoes. I can’t get enough of them. Because I love fresh tomatoes so much, I have a small container garden on my balcony every year. You’ll hear more about that on Friday, in the listening quiz. Tomorrow and the rest of this week, we’ll be talking about gardens and gardening.
I thought it was a topic that fit well with the beginning of spring. This way, if you’re out in your garden working, you’ll be able to think about what you’re doing in English.
Tomorrow we’ll talk about what a garden is, exactly, and Wednesday we’ll talk about the verbs we use in the garden. For those of you who—like me—don’t have a garden. I don’t want you to think that this will be a week of vocabulary that you can’t use. A lot of this vocabulary also applies to areas of your life outside the garden. And Thursday we’ll learn several idioms that come from the garden—maybe we can call them ‘garden fresh idioms’—but that you can use in several different contexts.
And, just like I promised in the first paragraph, on Friday I’ll tell you about my own gardening attempts—all the gardening we can do in an apartment—and there will be questions on everything you learned this week in the listening quiz.
For the week, though, it might be good to have a little bit of vocabulary for gardening. Here are three words that you will need to discuss your garden. . . and to understand the rest of what happens this week.
Vocabulary
Plant: We all know what a tree is. It’s what you get an apple from. But is a tree a person? Of course not! Is it an animal? Nope. A tree is a plant. In fact, any living thing that gets its energy from sunlight can be called a plant. (Biologists might call me crazy, but for normal people, I think that’s a good definition.) Your garden is where you take care of the plants that are important to you.
Seed: Plants don’t start life as babies. They start life as tiny seeds. You put seeds into the ground and give them water and they grow into plants in your garden. For most gardeners, the cheapest way to buy plants is to buy seeds.
Weed: You want your garden to be full of plants. But you don’t want just any plants, you know exactly what plants you want in your garden. The problem is that the plants that seem to grow most are the ones you don’t want. These are weeds. A weed is any plant that’s growing where you don’t want it to grow. I don’t know why, but it always seems as though weeds grow faster than the plants you want. Most gardeners spend a lot of time taking the weeds out of their gardens.
Photo Credit
The photo above is from Flickr. It was taken by Laura (& Garrett), who made it available under a Creative Commons license. Thanks, Laura and Garrett!
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July 6th, 2009 at 19:21
July 7th, 2009 at 16:48
Ben! Thanks for the praise. I’m trying to cover more interesting, unusual topics that you might not find in an English book.
A few pointers on your English: you wrote ’scientifical,’ but you meant scientific. The same for ‘choosed’ and chose. Other than that and a few typos, you did a great job!