英语博客(A cup of English):096 A new harvest.（在线收听）

Beginners.

One of the things I really enjoy is gardening. I have a patch of vegetable garden in one of the corners of our back yard. It has four raised beds. Two of these are wide wooden boxes which my husband put together. In these I put a mixture of manure, compost, and soil, a perfect combination to grow healthy vegetables. The other two raised areas are just piles of earth, but still, they are packed with tomatoes, peppers, and raspberries. My two favorite raised beds are quite organized. They have rows of all kinds of vegetables which will very soon produce a harvest. Here's the list: beets, tomatoes, onions, peppers, strawberries, collard greens, carrots, and lettuces. And that's only the first raised bed. Then, in the second, I've got rows of green pole and bush beens, parsnips, and loads of sugar snap peas, or 'mange tout'. Now that everything is growing up nicely, I love to visit the area, pull weeds out, pick whatever is ready, and then just sit in the shade of the nearest tree and contemplate. My children help me sometimes with the watering and weeding, but most of the time I actually prefer to do it myself; it's the one area of my home that I seem to have control of!

Grammar notes.

Veggy vocabulary: parsnips, beets, collard greens, manure.

Exs:

I love to have a roast dinner. Especially when those wonderful, white, winter parsnips are available.

Beets are a very  healthy, colorful vegetable. But be careful! The purple juice stains terribly.

If you cut out the main stem of collard greens, boil them, then stir fry them in garlic and butter, you will have a meal from heaven.

It's handy having goats and chickens next door. I can ask our neighbor for some of the manure for my vegetable garden.

Advanced.

Have you ever eaten sugar snap peas? They are one of my favorite snacks. When they are in prime condition, they are green, crunchy, juicy, and sweet. Yummy! You can eat them raw or cooked. Chinese stirfries are especially good with them, as long as you don't overcook them. At the moment we have plenty growing in our vegetable patch, and only a small percentage have been harvested and eaten. A key to keeping the production up is to fertilize and give extra water just after picking the ripe ones. If you do that, the plants are strengthened to continue production. There are all kinds of tricks to getting the most out of the vegetables. My mother has always grown vegetables, and so she always has great advice for me and my garden. "Lay the tomato plant down, as if it is in bed, when you plant it. The more the stalk goes underground, the more tomatoes you will get." Wow! Is that true? Well, it's worth a try. My intention is to eventually grow the majority of the vegetables that we eat, so I need all the advice I can get. One thing that I would love to have as part of my garden is a green house, or perhaps plastic house would be better, so my kids don't break it. We have such snowy, freezing winters that it is impossible to grow anything. I could lose myself planting seeds, transplanting, tending, and harvesting.

Grammar notes.

More vegetable vocabulary: to tend, advice, transplant, percentage.

Exs:

The lady tends to her flowers while her husband tends to the sheep.

My advice to you is to go out and get a job.

Yesterday he transplanted a sapling oak to his front garden. The next day, he had a hair transplant.

I will give fifty percent of the profits to the local orphanage.