Flowers & Celery Drinking Colours and Kid's Co-op

This is another experiment that I've been wanting to do for awhile, but just never got around to it. When at the grocery store one day, I saw a bouquet of white carnations, so I picked them up to do the colour changing flowers experiment.

We actually ended up doing this experiment three times before we got it to work right. The first two times, I think we didn't put enough food colouring in the water. After almost a week in the water, most of the flowers had barely even changed colour :( The blue flowers were the only ones that the colour change showed up enough that I could get a picture of them.

The only flowers that changed colours in our first two attempts

I bought a third bouquet along with a stalk of celery to try as well. This time, we put in a lot of food colouring and a little less water for each colour. We had eight different food colouring, a regular box of colours and a box of neon food colouring, so we made up eight cups of coloured water.

Sammie and I put one flower and one piece of celery in each cup and waited to see if it would work this time

After about 2 hours, you could really see the blue water in the celery :) It took a bit longer for any colour to show up in the flowers, but still better than the first two times we tried the experiment.

After two hours in the coloured water

By the next day, all the celery pieces and flowers had started to change colours and changed enough that I could get a picture of it :) We noticed that the celery in the red water and purple water had started to shrivel and dry up. The flower in the purple water was turning blue, not purple.
Sammie was quite excited to actually see a change in them. She started naming all the colours and kept going back over and over to see if they had changed more. lol

After 24 hours in the coloured water

48 hours in the water

We left them in the colour water for a couple more days to see how much more they would change.  I think we left them in for 3 or 4 more days. The celery and flowers were so pretty.

The blue celery pieces still looked great and very brightly coloured. The red pieces and the purple piece were really dried and shrivelled, I"m not sure why? The neon green and yellow coloured celery were very lightly coloured and almost hard to see. It was still so neat to have watched them change colours :) Sammie was very interested in looking at the celery and feeling the leaves. :)

The flowers turned pretty pastel colours. The yellows and blues changed colours the most. The flower in the purple water changed to more of a blue than purple. The reds are more pink than red, but very pretty. I love how most of the colour is concentrated in the tips of the petals :) Sammie had to smell the flowers to see if they had changed smells as well lol

A bouquet of coloured celery and a bouquet of pretty pastel carnations :)

This was very fun to do and watch :) I'm so glad that the third time's a charm and the experiment finally worked out for us. I loved seeing Sammie's reactions as she saw the flowers and celery changing colours and to explore them after we took them out of the water :)

As with all of our experiments, we don't discuss or explain much about the science behind the experiments, as I just want to keep these fun for Sammie. But for this experiment, we did talk a little bit about why the flowers and celery changed colours. I just sort of explained that the flowers still drink some water even after being picked and that because we had coloured the water, we could see where the water went as the flowers and celery drank the water :)

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