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

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 manure¹, 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: beets², tomatoes, onions, peppers, strawberries, collard greens, carrots, and lettuces³. 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 tout⁴'. 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 contemplate⁵. 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 fertilize⁶ 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 orphanage⁷.

 

1 manure   

n.粪，肥，肥粒；vt.施肥

参考例句：

• The farmers were distributing manure over the field.农民们正在田间施肥。
• The farmers used manure to keep up the fertility of their land.农夫们用粪保持其土质的肥沃。

2 beets   

甜菜( beet的名词复数 )； 甜菜根； （因愤怒、难堪或觉得热而）脸红

参考例句：

• Beets are Hank's favorite vegetable. 甜菜根是汉克最爱吃的蔬菜。
• In this enlargement, barley, alfalfa, and sugar beets can be differentiated. 在这张放大的照片上，大麦，苜蓿和甜菜都能被区分开。

3 lettuces   

n.莴苣，生菜（ lettuce的名词复数 ）；生菜叶

参考例句：

• My lettuces have gone to seed. 我种的莴苣已结子。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• Are these lettuces home-grown or did you buy them in the market? 这些生菜是自家种的呢，还是你在市场上买的？ 来自辞典例句

4 tout   

v.推销，招徕；兜售；吹捧，劝诱

参考例句：

• They say it will let them tout progress in the war.他们称这将有助于鼓吹他们在战争中的成果。
• If your case studies just tout results,don't bother requiring registration to view them.如果你的案例研究只是吹捧结果，就别烦扰别人来注册访问了。

5 contemplate   

vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视

参考例句：

• The possibility of war is too horrifying to contemplate.战争的可能性太可怕了，真不堪细想。
• The consequences would be too ghastly to contemplate.后果不堪设想。

6 fertilize   

v.使受精，施肥于，使肥沃

参考例句：

• Fertilizer is a substance put on land to fertilize it.肥料是施在地里使之肥沃的物质。
• Reading will fertilize his vocabulary.阅读会丰富他的词汇。

7 orphanage   

n.孤儿院

参考例句：

• They dispensed new clothes to the children in the orphanage.他们把新衣服发给孤儿院的小孩们。
• They gave the proceeds of the sale to the orphanage.他们把销售的收入给了这家孤儿院。