Today we are very excited to report we have growth on our vegetable tops! We have been 'growing' vegetable tops as a very simple, very quick and visual, fun science project.  Have you ever done this? 

All you need are the cut off tops of a few parsnips and carrots (one or the other, or both, it doesn't matter) and a saucer of water.  Place the 'tops' in the saucer and place on a window sill.  Make sure you top the water up regularly as they can be thirsty.  

Over a very short amount of time (only about 3-4 days) you will notice new green shoots appear out of the tops.  Over time (ours have been growing about a week now) you will see quite a lot of new growth.  We are going to watch ours a while longer and see how they grow.

You could discuss with the children why they think this happens? They key is obviously that parsnips and carrots are both root vegetables, so the 'tops' are still part of the plants root system and able therefore to produce further growth.  

You can see we are also growing celery.  Again this has just been done from the discarded leftovers of a crown of celery. We just put the base in water (to begin with we put it in a glass jar with an inch or so of water at the bottom.  We think this probably sped up the process as it was like being in it's own little green house :-)  We are hoping it will grow big enough for us to eat!  In the meantime, it is interesting watching new roots growing from it and seeing how much it has grown. 

The is a great fun little experiment as it yields results really quickly (unlike actually growing the carrots in the first place - although we have done that as well! :-) ) and it ties in quite nicely with our 'Farming' theme last month, as a kind of 'Kitchen Garden' experiment. 

Give it a go.  We'd love to see other people's results :-)