Admit it. You all have been waiting anxiously by your computer screens to discover the results. Ok, really not, and I’m sorry it took me an entire week to get the results posted {grins}. Will you forgive me?

You all were fairly mixed on your opinions of which plant was the winner vs. loser in our little experiment! My hubby {being the official powers-that-be} got an up close and personal look at the three plants and cast his vote too.

And for the record, he didn’t know which plant was which either, so he was an impartial voter. I didn’t hand out flyers for a specific plant before he voted, nor did I wear any “Vote for X Plant!” stickers during the process. I’m just sayin’…

All that said, he voted right down the line ~ #1, #2, and then #3 based not only on growth, but also color.

A few more pictures of the flowers before and after.

Before…

After…

and another after…

The results… So that I would be able to keep track of which plant was which {and still keep the water types a secret…} I fed the plants water alphabetically:

Plant #1 ~ filtered and boiled water, brought to room temperature

Plant #2 ~ filtered water brought to room temperature

Plant #3 ~ filtered and microwaved water, brought to room temperature

I wasn’t sure how the plants would fare during the time of the experiment, so you might notice that plant number 2 {the one that received the filtered water only} started out a bit behind the curve. It was the ‘runt’ of the plant litter, so to say.

When the experiment was done, plant #1 {boiled water} was the tallest and flowering the most, plant #2 was doing well and flowering, and plant #3 wasn’t flowering as much.

Were the results what you expected? Truthfully, I expected much more ‘defined’ results with this and DO want to do it again, but with different plants all at the same time {i.e. two or three different plant types}. We’ll have to see if we have time later this year to do it again!

Really when it all came down to it, this was super simple…but it was a lot of fun! I saw an experiment that Jodi at Granola Mom for God was doing on her site {Part 1 and Part 2} and figured that we needed to run our own little experiment too.

The experiment was simple and straightforward ~ buy three of the same plants and ‘feed’ them each a different type of water. One was on a strict ‘boiled-water’ diet, one was ‘microwaved-water’ and one just plain ol’ water. We wanted to see if the manner in which the water was treated made any difference in the quality of life of the plant.

Why, you might ask?  I was really, truly curious to see what our results would show and if subsequently we would be chucking a microwave to the curb. I am well aware that Snopes has this experiment on their website, but after seeing what was happening over at Jodi’s house…well, I wanted in on the challenge.

The Plants

I chose three lovely pansies as our victims, plucked off all the dead growth from them and set them up outside to start the experiment. All three plants were given fair and equal treatment, other than the water that they were fed. Their rights were:

~ Receiving a form of filtered water: Filtered {straight-up}, filtered & boiled, and filtered & microwaved. All water was stored in the same type of glass jars that all ran through the same dishwasher cycle to begin with and covered with a lid so the water wouldn’t evaporate or get contaminated.

~ Fair and equal time in the sunshine and wind {and one day of rain}.

~ A rotation around our porch so that not one of the plants could complain about the angle of the sun’s rays {or lack thereof}.

~ Protection from cold weather and harmful children.

~ Equal servings of water. If one plant received 1/2 cup of water, the other two received the same amount, or whatever amount was given…just to keep plant sibling rivalry down.

The plants were assigned numbers that no one, not even Daddy, knew the significance of the numbers. Number 1, 2, and 3 ~ ‘cause we’re fancy like that.

And because I’m mean, I’m not going to tell you which plant is which.

The Results

After almost three weeks, I lined our plants back up and took a mug-shot of them all together again ~ from 1 to 3.

And to give them each a little more attention, here they are a little more ‘close-up’:

To be ‘fair to plant number 2, it was definitely the runt of the bunch when they were purchased. But I’m curious ~ which one out of the three do you think looks the best? The worst?

I’ll let you all have a chance to comment and then I’ll chime in with another post later this week to reveal the secret identity of each of the plants…so stay tuned, but first CHIME IN!!! What do you think?

With our school year wrapping up and our {ahem} lack of science experiments during the school year, we’re having fun playing around now and learning through our experiments.

Recently we had fun making rain together ~ not outside, but in our own kitchen. The kids were fascinated by it even though it was such a simple activity.

We only needed four simple things:

~ a pot

~ ice

~ a teakettle

~ water

You can pretty much get an idea of what to do from this picture here. We put the ice into the pot, boiled the water, and waited until the teakettle started to steam and held the pot in the stream of the steam. The steam coming from the teakettle is the ‘cloud’.

After awhile, the kid’s arms tired from holding the pot so high {about 18”} above the steam, so Mommy had to step in and hold it up and high. Do you see the condensation forming on the outside of the pot?

Little by little the condensation started gathering in certain areas of the pot and finally started forming little ‘rain’ droplets and dripping all over our stove. We made rain! When the warm, moist air meets the cold air ~ rain happens!

I’m hoping to start posting some of the activities that we’re doing each week and linking up to Science Sunday hosted by Ticia at Adventures in Mommydom. I’m not promising anything spectacular, just simple & fun stuff that we’re doing!