My House Stinks

(Note: no we don't always make Sarah wear her bike helmet when she is gardening. (o: Only when it's for science experiments! he he )

It is science experiment season in the northwest.

The kids are working on science experiments for the science fair at school next week.

Sarah had a cool idea for hers...

She is giving some pea plants different kinds of liquids to "drink".

We are watering one with milk, one with lime margarita mix (it's an ingredient for Billy*'s ribs), sugar water, salt water and of course, boring old water.

After two weeks of watering, the smells from the various liquids (especially the milk) are getting pretty rank. I'm happy that tomorrow will be our last day for collecting data and we can throw out the stinky plants.

We did a couple other experiments with watering - this one was seeing how using different amounts of watering affects plants. I thought this turned out very cool. The "over watered" plant is very leggy and hardly has any flowers and the underwater plant has hardly grown and is looking sad.

Just in case you were wondering, plants don't like salt water.

Sarah and I were actually surprised how well the "milk" plant did. It looked very healthy up until just two days ago. I think the milk starting to spoil is the problem, otherwise, milk might actually not be such a bad thing to water with! (o: The sugar water plant has also done surprisingly well and is still doing good.

The sugar water one is second from the left and the water "control" plant is on the right. Obviously, the tried and true method of watering with water seems to be the best for plants. Surprise! (o:

We also did one more experiment with white flowers in soil. We tried watering two of the plants with red and blue colored water to see if the flowers would take on those colors. After two weeks, they are still as white as can be. It works with cut flowers in a vase, but doesn't seem to work for flowers in soil. Interesting. (o:

Natalie has also been doing an experiment, but we have had such disappointing results, we are going to try something else this weekend. We tried doing a taste test with Twilight using different flavored waters. She refused to drink ANY of them during our 4-6 hour long test periods. Stubborn cat! That's okay though, we have another cat experiment up our sleeves, she won't get off that easy! (o: Hopefully she'll feel up to a game of hide and go "treats" this weekend.