I lined up four glasses and half filled with water. We added either yellow, red and blue food colouring to three of the glasses and left the fourth with no colouring. I gave the colouring a good mix and then topped up with water. We cut about 2 inches off the bottom of each tulip and then placed a tulip in each of the glasses. I attempted to cut the remaining tulip stems in half so the flower could be split between two colours, however tulips are not easy to cut so this part of the experiment didn’t work too well.
The blue food colouring is powerful paste and it worked very quickly, within an hour the tulip was already slightly blue.
By the next day it was bluer still. When Luath told daddy to come look at the flowers he said “oh I didn’t know you could buy blue tulips”.
The red and yellow took a little longer to show. The blue flower is stunning but the leaves on that tulip have also turned blue which looks a bit yuk, however it does really show where the water travels too.
This is an easy experiment with pretty instant results if you use strong food colouring. Next time we do this we will repeat with stems we can cut in half.
Luath likes that the flowers changed colours and she could also see that they were drinking the water as the water level had gone down from being at the glass rim.
(Luath is 25 months)
Shared with Tuesday tots via Rainy Day mum
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