Let's learn English in the garden.
Let's start
by talking about one of the most common tools that you will use in the garden.
This is a shovel.
If I want to dig a hole in the ground, I would use this shovel.
This shovel is a great tool to dig a hole.
But if you look over here, I have this pile of compost.
If I wanted to put this into my wheelbarrow, I would then shovel it.
So there's two verbs that we use when we talk about a shovel.
You can dig with it and you can move material.
You can shovel with it.
And by the way, if you missed it, this is called a wheelbarrow.
By the way, there's also something called a spade.
It looks like this.
And it does the same job as a shovel when you need to dig a hole in the ground,
you can use a spade.
So this garden tool is called a hoe, and we use this to hoe.
If you don't know what that is, if you look down here,
you'll see that there are some weeds in the soil.
I can't do this standing up or you won't be able to see.
But if I use the hoe, I can use it to get rid of those weeds.
Weeds are these things that grow where you don't want them to grow.
We have our flowers in the flower beds and then sometimes we have weeds
and we need to use a hoe to get rid of them.
So I have two rakes here.
I would call this one a leaf rake, and I would call this one a fan rake.
They're kind of similar.
I would use this rake in the fall if there were a lot of leaves
on the ground and I needed to rake them up.
That's the verb we use.
I would use this fan rake if there were things like these
grass clippings on the ground.
If you notice down here, we mowed the lawn and there are some grass clippings.
If I wanted to put these in a pile,
I would use my fan rake to do that.
I would rake all the grass clippings into a pile.
Let's say, though, I needed to level out this stone, I would use a rake.
We sometimes call this a garden rake.
It's a little more durable than a fan rake.
It's a little tougher.
So if I needed to level out this pile of stone,
I would use this garden rake to rake it nice and level.
So this isn't a super common garden tool, but you might have one.
It's called a fork.
We sometimes call it a pitchfork and you use it to fork things.
That's the verb you use when you use this tool.
I have a big pile of grass clippings here.
If I wanted to put these into my wheelbarrow
or if I wanted to move them, I would use a fork.
I would fork them.
Oh, it's not going very good.
I would fork them with my fork.
Of course,
if you have lots of lawn, you need something like this.
We would call this a lawn tractor or a riding mower or a garden tractor.
We have a lot of lawn.
It would be kind of hard to mow all of it with a push mower.
So we use this.
It's so handy and it's just a little easier as well.
So if you don't have a riding mower,
you can always use a push mower or what we just simply call a lawn mower.
It's a little harder to use one of these, but if you need to mow your lawn.
That's the verb we use.
You would use a lawn mower like this one.
So sometimes when we're done mowing, we have grass along
things like this edge here and we want to trim it.
So we use a trimmer or sometimes we call this a weed wacker or a weed eater
or a whipper snipper.
And you can see as well that I have my safety glasses on and I'm
wearing hearing protection.
So if I want this to look nice and neat, I need to trim it.
It’s going to get a bit loud.
There, that looks great.
Sometimes you need to water your plants and then you use something like this.
This is called a garden hose.
You hook the garden hose up to a tap
and turn the water on so you can water your flowers or your vegetables.
Or you might use a pail
or a bucket to bring water out to the field.
We call this a pail or a bucket.
It's the same name, really.
Or you might have a watering can.
A watering can looks like this.
You put the water in here
and then you can pour water onto your flowers and vegetables.
Or if you're like us, you just use a sprinkler.
Behind me here, you can see we have a sprinkler running
this, shoots water onto all of the flowers that we’re growing here.
This is a very handy way to water everything.
So this tree is dead, and I don't have a chainsaw.
I wish I did.
So all I'm stuck with is using this ax.
You would use an ax to chop down a tree.
That's the verb we would use.
You would use an ax to chop down this tree.
If I had a chainsaw,
I would use the chainsaw to cut down the tree or chop down the tree.
I could use either verb.
But with an ax I would definitely use it to chop down this tree.
Now, I do also have a saw.
We sometimes call this a tree saw.
It's not made for cutting wood, but it's made for cutting down trees.
So I could use this saw to cut the tree down as well.
Now, if I wanted to just take off some little branches,
I would use these pruners.
We also use these for cutting flowers.
So I could snip off some branches on this tree
with my pruners or I could trim this tree with my pruners.
So if I didn't like some of these smaller branches, I could trim the tree.
But what if the branches are enormous?
I would then use these.
We would call these loppers.
We use these to lop off bigger branches.
Don't worry.
I know this is a live tree, but it did need to be trimmed anyways.
So you can chop down a tree, you can cut down a tree, you can snip off
or cut off smaller branches, or you can cut off or lop off larger ones.
So there's a couple things you might wear when you work in the garden.
You might wear a pair of gardening gloves.
When you work in the garden it's sometimes nice to protect your hands.
You might also wear boots.
It's really dewy out here this morning.
Sometimes after it rains, the grass is wet as well,
and it's nice to wear boots so that your feet stay dry.
So there was a bare spot here a few months ago,
and so we spread some grass seed using this spreader.
A spreader is something you use to spread seed.
I have a little bit of seed in here again, and as I turn it,
it will spread the seed all around me.
Hopefully you could hear that.
So this is our little spreader.
It's a little worse for wear.
We have some duct tape on it, but when you turn this crank,
this spins inside and it spreads seed or even fertilizer everywhere in your lawn.
So sometimes
you need to get down on your hands and knees and use little hand tools.
This would be what we call a weeder.
You can use this to get out weeds like dandelions.
They have really deep roots and this lets you get it out.
You also have this what you could call a tiny shovel or a trowel.
You could use this to dig a little hole if maybe you're planting bulbs
or something,
but it's sometimes nice to have little hand tools to use in the garden as well.
Well, thank you so much
for watching this English lesson about the things you can do in your garden.
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And by the way, there is a study pack for this lesson.
If you want some extra materials to help you practice the words and phrases
that you just learned. Have a great week. Bye.