How do plants use water? Do this experiment to find out!
What You Need:
2 celery sticks, one with leaves
Jar (or glass) of water
(jar or glass needs to be heavy enough not to tip with celery sticks inside)
Red or blue food color
Table knife
What to Do:
Add about 5 drops of food color to the water.
Using the table knife, cut a little bit off the bottom end of each celery stick.
Put the celery sticks in the jar (or glass).
30 minutes later, peel away the outer skin of each piece of celery to see in which stick the color has moved higher.
Cut across one of the celery sticks and look closely. Do you see the tiny hollow tubes?
What Is It All About?:
An important job of plant stems is to carry water from the roots up to the leaves and flowers. You saw this in the celery.
You could also see tiny hollow tubes. The colored water climbs up these tubes by a process called capillary action.
What you saw in the celery happens in trees. This
pulling power is really remarkable - look at trees and see how high branches
are from the ground.