why are we watering?

First day of spring i decided to try planting seeds with Dylan - again ( our past attempts had been pulled out, or overwater'd, or dumped to play with the dirt.)

We did our pots of dirt, put in the selected seeds, quite a variety to try establish a vege patch in pots, then a little bit of dirt on top of the seeds. We made labels out of leafs and seed packets or wrote on the pots. Then i made him a special watering bottle so it would only spray a light spray (as in the past the normal watering can has drowned the seeds in enthusiastic watering).

I got a 1 litre milk bottle and drawing pin & poked holes in the lid for a seedling watering can.

In a week our rocket had sprouted to Dylan's delight, a big yell when he saw them to come & see.

When i let him fill his seedling water can he was full of questions, he wanted hot water so i explained how this would kill the seeds ( I must show him what happens when you pour boiling water on a weed)

The next Question was how do they drink the water?

Aha! i will show you i said. So in the fridge we had some celery, i let him cut 3 stems with leaves & we put food colouring in 3 containers. I split the stem of ea. celery to help it draw the coloured water. We put them in the water on the windowsill. within 20 mins you could see the red colouribg coming up the celery, i yelled for Dylan to come look see, He was delighted and you could see the veins in the leaf showing in red. I explained how roots act like a straw & drink water & he could see it in the celery. Within the hour the other pieces had sucked up the colour too.

This morning the first thing Dylan said when he woke was he was going to look at the celery which have totally sucked up the coloured water & changed colour :)

I thought we could cut the leaves off today and glue them to some paper to further our discussions about plants drinking water.

x Noni