psocoptera

Project: Can We Change A Hydrangea's Color?
Materials: fresh and dried hydrangea flowers, white vinegar, saturated baking soda solution
Explanatory details: Hydrangea color has something to do with soil pH, right? So is the flower color reactive to pH? We tried submerging petals in acidic and basic solutions and also setting up vinegar and baking soda vases so that the solutions might be drawn up into the flower over the course of the day.
How did it go: The flowers left in vinegar were brownish by evening, nothing else seemed to have much of an effect, and further reading suggests that soil pH affects aluminum uptake by the plant and aluminum forms a complex with the blue pigment and I probably shouldn't actually sit here reading journal abstracts about this, sigh.
Things we talked about: Vinegar and baking soda are "opposites" so they might have different effects on the flowers. (Also we reiterated some of the things we've talked about before when playing with vinegar and baking soda, like "vinegar+vinegar won't fizz, it has to be one+the other".)
What Junie got out of it: Junie loves doing "fizzy science" and had great fun pouring scoops of the two solutions together. She also loves ripping up flowers and playing around with them. So she had a great time getting to do both these things at once.

(ETA: after leaving them overnight, the vinegar flowers were notably pink where they weren't brown, so maybe there is something worth playing with here. Not interesting for tinies, but maybe for bigs, trying a more dilute vinegar solution.)