Improving on Nature?

We've been doing more experiments. This one took days to complete but we had fun setting it up and were pleased with the results. We've talked frequently in the garden about how plants take up water from their roots and it travels up the stems, but this lets them actually see it happening.


We started by making strong solutions of food colouring - one pink and one blue - in oddly appropriate glasses, and then standing some poor white flowers and sticks of celery in them.
We let them stand overnight, and by the next day we could see the vessels clearly stained in a slice of celery. The light was rotten - this was midday, outside.



It made me want to buy a tiny microscope - too soon, too soon. Though I am tempted to buy one for myself.

After another day or so the white flowers had blue (or pink) streaks in the petals


and the celery was nothing short of alarming! (if you click on this one you can see the tiny veins in the leaf are dyed. I know, I'm a geek.)


Would you eat that?! Really, this is the only good use for celery, I think. To me it is just evil in plant form.

I've found a couple of good books of experiments for little people, and this one is a cross between stuff I did at school and ideas from "The Usborne Big Book of Experiments". There's a newer version of it - a book of Science Things to Make and Do, like those fairy books they do - that I think I may request from Father C in a month or so. I have tried to be a good girl ...