Science Project

Hannah and I watched a neat video from the library about plant structure and growth. It was really interesting, and Hannah was proud of me for not falling asleep through it. =) It showed this neat experiment that Hannah wanted to do. It kind of worked for us. We put a stalk of celery in a glass of water with red food coloring. Then we took a flower and split it's stem down the middle so we could stick half of it in red water and half in blue. On the video they had a white carnation, so I wasn't sure how the yellow daffodil would turn out. They also had a carrot with its greenery still on top of it to stick in blue water, but I didn't have one.
As the plants soak up the water, the leaves on the celery were supposed to turn red, and the flower petals should have turned colors too. The carnation in the video ended up half blue and half red, so I thought our daffodil would be orange and green. When it's finished you can cut through the celery and see the xylem, the tissue of the plant that carries the water from the roots to the rest of the plant.
The celery worked pretty well. It took about a day before we could see any changes in the leaves, and at first I just wondered if they were turning brown. =) But, as you can see, the daffodil didn't really work. It was already starting to wilt when I picked it out of our yard, so maybe that was the problem. You could see where the red and blue did travel up the stem a little, but it just didn't make it to the blossom. I think I may actually buy a carnation next time I'm at the store. It was a neat experiment.

(Speaking of experimentation, notice the color change in my kitchen. Picking out colors is so hard for me, it's all guesswork as to what will actually look good on the walls. I'm going to put the second coat of paint on when I finish this. The color looks nicer on my walls than it does in the picture on this computer. At least I hope it does. We're having someone come in next week to paint the living room and formal dining room and do a little remodeling in the living room. I'll post some pictures when it's all done.)