Plant Science going great...

That is, when it is going at all. The last two weeks have been SO crazy busy! We have been searching and searching for our perfect house, and we have found a couple that could work. But it has sort of consumed our world. I told the kids that for the next two days stuff was going back to normal.

Above is the egg shell herb garden. It gets bigger every day and is so sweet looking! I made those little signs so the kids could identify the seedlings easily at the same time the third leaf was coming out (which is usually a great identifier) and they have been enjoying guessing what each one is before I put the label back in and then being all excited when they are right.

Stems. In botany we are studying stems. This experiment was about water pulling up stems and how the water goes to the tips of each of the petals. It took about 24 hours for this dye to really show.... but when it did, they really got the point.

A white rose in green dye.

White daisy in blue.

White daisy in pink.

Amazing contrast huh? This is just after 24 hours. They will get darker as they are left in the water, and pretty soon each of the flowers will be an unnatural hue. This experiment really hits home how important water is to plants. And it shows the water cycle very well too... because if you leave one of these plants in the sun and the water gets warm enough to evaporate, the flower dies.

I found that celery is the very best stem to study. If you cut it in half and put each end in a different color of water, you will see that the celery leaves will change differently depending on which side of the stem is feeding it. We tried that with a daisy stem, but it really didn't work we as well. So I think that we are going to add celery to the stem experiment in the next couple days and I will let you know how it turns out.