Daily Dose of English 50
Plants
Daily Dose of English 50
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about plants. Well, more specifically, I think I'm going to talk about houseplants because that's what I meant when I wrote down this title. However, I think I might keep it as plants just so that I can talk about other plants if I want to. So first, I might as well just talk about what plants are before we get into talking about them in general. So plants are the things that are all around us in the world. They're living things, and they have roots, and they typically bring in nutrients from the sun. They're very often green, and they live out in the dirt. Usually. However, there are so many different kinds of plants and varieties and species. They're almost as varied as animals. Actually, I think they're more varied. I have no idea. Probably. But there's a whole heck of a lot of different kinds of plants. Some of them are really, really beneficial for humans. Some of them are not. They're pretty bad for whatever reason. Many of them are part of our lives every single day. And some of them we've never even seen or heard of because they only exist in one tiny little island in the middle of the Atlantic or something. And so there's a lot of different kinds of plants. And only some of them, a pretty small section of those plants, do we keep as houseplants. In a lot of ways, plants are similar to pets, right, houseplants rather, because you choose to bring a living thing into your home that you need to care for and to make sure it doesn't die in order to add something to your home or to your apartment. In the case of an animal, it's usually companionship and maybe a function, right? If it's a guide dog or a mouse hunting cat. But often it's just for the fact that it's an animal and that they're nice and they're cuddly and they're cute. And a similar sort of thing goes for plants. Sometimes they have a function. Occasionally people have plants to block sunlight or to make the soil better. I don't know. There's not that many plants, except for the common one, which is to grow food. If you have a basil plant or potentially chives, thyme, these are all plants that you can eat and keep in your house pretty easily. You can also have something outside, which isn't really a house plant, but also kind of is in the same vein of maybe a fruit tree or something that gives you food every so often. You can also have a garden if you want. A garden is where you go to specifically plant food to grow and then to eat later. So for example, you might have a garden with carrots and potatoes, lettuce, strawberries, lots of different kinds of food. And it can be really convenient if you need just a little bit of something or you want something specific, or if you just like that process of gardening and growing your own food. It can also save you money in some ways. However, you're exchanging that money for time. And so it depends on if you want to make that exchange or you find it enjoyable to grow your own food. However, food and useful plants isn't really what I had in mind for today. Like I said, I want to talk more about houseplants, which are typically plants that you bring into your home to look nice. because they add a lot of life to a home, to a space especially. And I think I have a good appreciation for plants in homes. And I think it's been growing more because growing up, I've always had some plants in the house. My mother enjoys having house plants. But it was never like a big thing, right? It was sort of just like plant here, plant there, right? Have a plant in every room, more or less. But it was never something that was like blatant, really obvious about our home. It's like, oh, wow, they have a lot of plants. That was never really the thing until a little more recently. But that's not my home. That's their home. That's where my parents live. And they have a lot of plants, which looks really cool. It creates a bit more of a, not jungle vibe. I don't want to say it's a jungle vibe, but it feels more warm in some ways. It feels like there's more moisture in the air and it's a bit more inviting in a lot of ways. And so when I sort of had to kind of put together my own apartment and start to think about what I have as my own decorations, like I have the simple things, like I already knew about making sure to have art on the wall, things like that, that fill up space and make the walls look a little bit more interesting. but I never really focused on using plants for decoration and how they can be beneficial and what they can do. I do have some plants, but I'm trying to get better and to learn more about how plants can fill a space and can look nice and can make you enjoy a space more. However, I've got a lot of room to learn and grow, because it's kind of hard for me. It's not something that I'm naturally interested in. It's not something that I naturally want to think about or to learn about. And so I kind of have to push myself to do more, I don't know, thinking about plants or buying plants, organizing them, caring for them, because I do, like I said, I have some, but I very frequently just don't think about watering them. Watering plants is when you give plants water or you make sure that there's no whatever in the pot, right? There's no extra debris or garbage or like a leaf fell or something, right? You clean those out, you give the plants water and you give them a little bit of care that we typically call watering. I also want to clarify that word pot is what the plant goes inside, a plant pot, if you will. Some other, might as well, might as well talk about vocab. There's some other plant vocab like soil is a little bit more of a fancy word for dirt. Soil typically has the connotation or the meaning that it's good for the plants. However, that's not strictly true, right? Dirt is basically the same word. However, when we talk about soil, it's like, okay, this is for plants. And so if you go to the store, you might find potting soil, which is specifically for putting in pots for plants. That soil often has more nutrients, more food for the plants, so that it stays stronger and healthier, better-er, I guess. What was I saying? Oh yeah, so there was some plant vocab. And oh, plant care, that's the big thing. Because that's, in my opinion, the hardest part about having plants is making sure that they get cared for correctly. Because all plants need different things. It's pretty obvious with animals that we're used to keeping around, cats and dogs. A lot of people know, OK, there's cat food and there's dog food that are good for the different kinds of animals. You should take dogs out for a walk at least once a day. Cats need this, dogs need this, da, da, da, whatever. Even for some lesser common animals, if you have a guinea pig or a parrot or whatever, there's a lot of more common knowledge like that. However, a lot of people don't know how to take care of plants, myself included, absolutely, I do not know how, because they have such different needs than animals do. Animals are related to humans a lot more closely. because we are animals, technically. But plants need things that are totally different, right? Sunlight and air movement, different kinds of soil nutrients. They need things like nitrogen in the soil, I think, maybe. But it's also nice to put extra plant food sometimes, but not always. And some of them want shade, but only for a couple hours a day. And some of them grow in the winter better than the summer. There's all of these different questions and things that you sometimes need. You don't really strictly need to know about them for all plants. But it's really nice to know if you want to have a lot of plants. And so I really struggle to keep that in my head. And so I think one way that I'm going to approach this when I want to learn more about plants is by trying to conceptualize and think about that information in a way that makes sense for me. But we'll see when it comes to that. Right now, I'm just sort of talking about plants. And I think I've gotten everything out there that I want to say about plants. I honestly didn't have a ton to talk about. And so I kind of just made some stuff up. So I hope that you don't mind. And I hope that you found this episode at least a little bit interesting and maybe learned a few words here and there. But I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye. See you then.
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