英语博客(A cup of English):063 Pruning time

　　Beginners.

The weather has finally changed from dull and freezing to warm and sunny. Everybody I meet when I go about my daily activities seems happy. Winter feels very, very long by the time we reach March. So, hurray for April! One of the greatest things to see at the moment is new growth. All over the garden there are signs of plants and flowers beginning to grow. Most of them are mainly underground, and just a little green is poking 1 through the earth. Daffodils and bluebells 2 have already flowered, of course; they are the typical early Spring flowers. Some people have loads of them all over their front yards; we don't. I'll have to buy some bulbs this Fall and get to work on that. Even the supermarkets have shelves full of different colored Spring flowers in different colored baskets and pots. The down side to this season is that there is lots of work to do in the garden. I don't mind it, though, as I am a gardener at heart. My husband does most of the hard work. This weekend, he worked like a mule 3 in the garden. Because we have a lot of lawn, he had to hire a couple of machines to aerate 4 and thatch 5 the lawn. He then fertilized 6 it. We have about an acre of land, so it took him most of the weekend! I just do the fun stuff, like plant flowers and vegetables, weed, and dig. Yes, I love to dig. I have inherited a love of gardening from my grandmother on my father's side. In our family, we all have strong backs and green fingers.

Grammar notes.

Useful expressions: Hurray for ......, to have green fingers, (I, you etc) don't mind, loads of .....

Exs: Hurray for Superman! He has saved us again!

I don't have green fingers at all; I only have houseplants, and I manage to kill all of them. My neighbor has really green fingers. She can grow anything and everything.

I don't mind if you finish all of the milk; just buy some more as soon as you can, please.

In the shop there were loads of bargains, and the whole shopping center was full of loads of people.

Advanced.

This lunch time when I came home from picking up my little girl from preschool, there was a loud, mechanical noise in  the neighborhood. It wasn't the usual moan of a lawn mower 7; it was much louder. I went out into the back yard and saw that some men were up in the neighbors' high trees with chainsaws. "What are those men doing up there, Mum?" asked Domini. "They're pruning 8, by the looks of it," I replied. "What's pruning?" my daughter asked. "They are cutting the trees." I replied. At this, Domini pulled a cross face, ran onto the lawn, and yelled, " Hey, you bad men, you stop cutting those nice trees!" "It's alright, babe," I said quickly, " I think the neighbor paid them to do it. The trees need a bit of a hair cut; some of the branches are too long." I was pleased that the noise of the chainsaws was loud enough to drown out the noise of my very loud daughter. As I looked at the men in the trees, I could just about make out that they were roped up. This enabled them to swing around from branch to branch, Tarzan style...., well, a very slow, heavy Tarzan style, and without the monkeys. They chopped and chopped, bringing down big limbs of the tree that is one of the biggest in the neighborhood. "What a shame!" I thought as a huge branch fell to the ground. But then a thought occured to me. This very old tree hangs right over my vegetable patch ; it's probably good for me that the weakest, old branches get cut off so they don't land on my head while I'm gardening!

Grammar notes.

Verbs: to prune 9, to yell, to drown out (noise), to enable.

Exs: I get confused about the best times to prune different plants,- some plants need it in the Spring, others in the Autumn.

He was so mad that he yelled for five minutes; when he finished, he realised that nobody was listening.

The dump truck's engine drowned out the noise of the awful music, thank goodness.

Having a regular babysitter enables me to go out and to participate in interesting events.