Morning is when the plant is filled with stored food and the flowers are most fragrant. If you'd like to grow your own flowers and bedding plants, you'll appreciate my easy-to-follow seed starting tips. Dianthus make great, long-lasting cut flowers. Plus, they're edible!
It's easy to make your own colored flowers, especially carnations and daisies, but there are a couple of tricks that help ensure great results. Here's how you do it.
Tips
- Materials: Light-colored flowers, food coloring, water
- Concepts Illustrated: Evaporation, cohesion, xylem, capillary action
- Time Required: Few hours to a day
- Experience Level: Beginner
Colored Flower Materials
- Fresh flowers, preferably white - Don't use wilted flowers since they might not be able to absorb water well. Good choices include daisies and carnations.
- Food coloring
- Warm water
You can use other colors of flowers besides white. Just keep in mind the final color of the flower will be a mix of the nature pigments in the flower and the dye. Also, many flower pigments are pH indicators, so you can simply change the color of some flowers by putting them into water with baking soda (a base) or lemon juice/vinegar (common weak acids).
Make Colored Flowers
- Trim the stems of your flowers so they aren't excessively long.
- Make a slanted cut at the base of the stem under water. The cut is slanted so that the stem won't sit flat on the bottom of the container. A flat cut can prevent the flower from taking in water. Make the cut underwater to prevent air bubbles from forming in the tiny tubes at base of the stem, which would prevent water/color from being drawn up.
- Add food coloring to a glass. You're looking at about 20-30 drops of food coloring per half cup of warm water. Warm water will be taken more readily than cold water.
- Set the damp stem of the flower in the colored water. The petals should become colored after a few hours. It may take as long as 24 hours, however, depending on the flower.
- You can set the colored flowers in plain water or flower preservative, but they will continue to drink water, changing the pattern of the color over time.
Getting Fancy
You can slit the stem up the middle and put each side in a different color to get bi-colored flowers. What do you think you will get if you put half of the stem in blue dye and half in yellow dye? What do you think will happen if you take a colored flower and put its stem in dye of a different color?
How It Works
A few different processes are involved in plant 'drinking' or transpiration. As water evaporates from flowers and leaves, the attractive force between water molecules called cohesion pulls more water along. Water is pulled up through tiny tubes (xylem) that run up a plant's stem. Although gravity might want to pull the water back down toward the ground, water sticks to itself and these tubes. This capillary action keeps water in the xylem in much the same way as water stays in a straw when you suck water through it, except evaporation and biochemical reactions provide the initial upward pull.
See these pretty purple flowers on the basil plants? Yeah, they need to go.
The hot, humid weather is sending my basil plants into overdrive, and they’re sending up stalks of purple flowers every day. They are pretty flowers, but they are also a sign that the plant is shutting down and going into reproduction mode (instead of growth mode, shooting out more basil leaves for my pesto cravings).
Some basil plants flower quicker than others, and there’s great variety in the way the flowers look. I have another variety that sends up delicate white flowers. I pinch them off at their base and put them in tiny bud vases in the kitchen, where they both look and smell beautiful.
Pinching off these flowers helps keep the plant growing. In fact, while pinching off the flower buds will help, it’s even better to whack off half the plant and make pesto. Give it a week or two and you’ll find an even more robust basil plant grown back.
Are you growing basil this summer? Got any other good growing tips?
![I like the flowers vocal warm up I like the flowers vocal warm up](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125735633/823229799.jpg)
![Like Like](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125735633/132158358.jpg)
Published: Jul 13, 2011