Exploring Plants: We Grew Roots From Cuttings

Plants! Plants! Plants

We can never get tired of plants in our little homeschool. They are amazing. Magical, even. Imagine, from tiny seeds, little plants sprout and grow?! Some seeds were stored for many months, years even, and yet they can still grow into plants.

What better way to learn more about plants than to get your hands dirty with some soil and water, right? Of course, my little learners are always game for this. We can identify parts of the plants by the book, draw them on paper, but it's always best to learn by exploring the actual thing -- touch, smell, see...

These tomato plants from our mini vegetable garden are our best examples for now -- they have roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits. Perfect! What Little Man has been looking forward to is for these fruits to ripen. He checks them every day.

Other Ways to Grow Plants

For some reason, Little Man has always thought that plants only grow from seeds. I think that must have to be from observation -- we usually start our vegetable garden from seeds and most of our plant experiments always involve making seeds sprouts and growing them.

You may also remember our previous activity where we had some chia and flax seeds sprout on damp paper towels.

Science Experiment: The Seeds and the Baby Plants

Continuing from the seed sprouting activity, we tried to grow some plants from CUTTINGS.

Can we make new plants grow from some water spinach stalks?

So the Little Man and I went to the garden and cut a stalk from our very abundant water spinach patch. This patch was grown from only a couple of stalks I had leftover from cooking. This has now benefitted not only our family, but also other families living in our villa.

We also cut a stalk of the rose plant and put them in a jar of water. Filled with awe and excitement, Little Man kept on staring at the plants.

"Are these really going to grow roots?"

"If I remove them from the water, are they going to die?"

"Is Daddy going to be mad because we cut his plants?" LOL.

Three days later, the water spinach stalk already grew new roots. Even I got excited as I heard Little Man call me, "Mommy, the plant has roots!".

Yes, almost like magic! 🎇