Plant food factories.

Plants need plenty of food to grow. Unlike people, plants do not order their food in a restaurant or buy it from a store. That’s because plants manufacture or make their own food! The plant’s leaves are its food factories. Using energy that they gather from the sun, leaves combine water with carbon dioxide that they breathe in from the air, and make sugars. These sugars are the plant’s food that it needs to grow. The process of plants making their own food is called photosynthesis (fo-toe-SIN-the-sis). It is also how plants make oxygen.

Learn more about how plants make their food