From seedling to plant

We planted our seedlings that we grew from popcorn kernels. We had a fun time filling biodegradable pots with soil, sticking in the seedlings, and planting the pots. I wasn't really sure if they'd survive the transplant, but we dutifully watered them every day. Within a few days we started seeing little plants poking out of the soil. Since then they've just kept growing and growing. It's neat to see what our little popcorn kernels are turning into. We're now working on trying our hand at baby carrots.

From seed to seedling

After a few fun trips to our local plant nursery, I thought it would be neat to show jr. scientist A. how a seed turns into a plant. We took a plastic container and lined the inside wall with a damp paper towel. Then we stuck a few popcorn kernels between the paper towel and the wall of the container. With dutiful watering to make sure the towel stayed damp and a nice sunny windowsill, we started to see some sprouting in a few days. A few days after that there were little purple roots climbing downwards and little greet shoots climbing upwards - how do they know how to do that! Tomorrow we're planning on transplanting our seedlings to a dirt pot to let them grow bigger.

Sun bleaching in the rainy season

We did some more sun bleaching - this time making sure everything was firmly attached to prevent the cats from interfering. It ended up raining and raining and raining for days in a row, making it take more days than usual. In the end it turned out pretty well. Jr. scientist A. wanted me to cut out the rectangle to carry around and then was surprised that, without the surrounding bleached out paper, it just looked like an ordinary sheet of construction paper.

Sun-bleaching

We're starting to do some experiments using the sun. The big downside is that these tend to take awhile so they're more set-it-and-forget-it types of experiments. Our first sun experiment is sun-bleaching. Since the sun will bleach color out of construction paper (or just about anything else), we set up a sheet of bright red construction paper in a window that gets strong sunlight and put a few objects on it - the idea being that the sun will bleach all of the paper except what is under the objects and we'll end up with permanent "shadows" of the objects.

Our first attempt was thwarted by our cats, who clearly aren't big fans of science (they often try to chew on the materials for our science projects) who knocked all the objects into different places on the paper each day, giving us multiple and ill-defined "shadows." Still very exciting to see that the experiment can work! We're now clipping a key to the paper, which I hope will prevent the cats from causing more mischief.

Next up: sun dials and pin hole (construction paper) cameras.