Growing a Poor Man's Garden

The boys had a Science fair a few weeks back. Entering the Science Fair was mandatory for Kace at his grade level, but Cris had a choice and he chose to do it, because he was offered to skip 2 weeks of homework if he entered. Little did he know that still meant some sort of work needed to be done. I saw this really cool activity come across my email a while back so I proposed the idea to Cris... he loved it and wa la we were off to making a mess, mixing chemicals and growing what I like to call a poor mans garden. It is actually called a 'Crystal Garden' I call it the poor mans garden because this fun experiment became popular during the depression... how appropriate considering we are sitting in the middle of a recession... wow, its like a history lesson too! A lesson on how history repeats itself. okay getting off track.
We started off mixing salt, water, ammonia and laundry bluing... we found some porous objects... a Sponge, cork and charcoal briquette. Oh and the colors are from food coloring to try and make it cooler.

Day 1... the beginning... please grow, please grow!

Day 2- the sponge and cork taking off like wild flowers


day 5- The Charcoal had awoken and started to bloom prettier than the others... proof something so dark and dirty can be beautiful. Also notice how it is growing on the wall of our container... its plastic, I guess it too was porous enough to grow on.


Cris at the Science Fair... he had his photo taken for the District newsletter, the school newspaper and is going on to the District fair. He had a lot of good responses, over 200 other experiments and one parent came back up to him after looking at them all and said "if there was a prize tonight you should get it, because yours is the best here"... that makes a mom proud.


And I was lucky enough to be doubly proud that night... Kace did an experiment on if age affects how a person sees in the dark. He wrote it wonderfully and we made this dark box to simulate a person walking into a dark room to see how long it would take a persons eyes to adjust and if they could see any of the objects on the back wall in the box. The hypothesis was that it takes an older person longer because just like the rest of our bodies, we are getting worn out. This amazing kid got an A...rightfully so.