In class yesterday I handed out little brown paper bags with a few tulip bulbs in them.
Now I want to tell you the sort of fun you can have with them! This would be a REALLY interesting Personal Enrichment project if you wanted to do it. It is cool enough, but also complex enough, that I think you could even enter it in the WHEN science fair and get pretty far into that competition.
Most of our tulips come up in April and May. The Thanksgiving Point Tulip Festival usually runs from mid April through the first week in May, although this last year they had to extend it because our winter was so wet and snowy so the flowers didn’t come up and bloom until later in the spring. But the nurseries and grocery stores often have blooming tulips for sale in March! Are their bulbs just early bloomers? Did you ever wonder how the plants know when to grow? Is it heat? Is it water? Is it light?
In your book How Plants Work, chapter 6 is all about how plants know when to grow and how flowers know when to blossom. It’s really interesting! But the really fun part about it, is that you can trick plants into blooming whenever you want them to! I recommend you read all of chapter 6, “How Plants tell Time,” or just start on page 141 and read to the end of that chapter. See if you can trick your tulip bulbs into sprouting and blooming in time for Valentine’s Day, or maybe even earlier! Take good notes about what/how/when/why you are doing what you do so that if someone wanted to recreate your experiment, they would know exactly how to replicate what you did. Keep drawings, measurements, and data (how much water, how much light, what kind of light, when you turned on the light, etc.) in your nature journal.
Use these instructions on bulb planting (except you can probably skip the bulb fertilizer part if you want) and plant them in a nice pot that you can easily transport. I would LOVE to hear all about the success of your experiment!!
Additionally, there is a great book on the book list about tulip bulbs. This book describes the absolute tulip hysteria that went on in Holland awhile back. The fact that this ACTUALLY happened, is ridiculous! But the history is cool. And the science is really interesting! It makes you look at tulips in a completely different way.
Also, if you think you might need a few more tulip bulbs, let me know! I’m going to try and put mine in the ground this week, but if I have any left, I’m happy to share the rest! I’m excited to see what they look like when they pop up!