Читать книгу Round the Year with Enid Blyton—Spring Book - Enid blyton - Страница 4

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Now I am going to tell you a good many different ways of growing seeds, so that you may watch them developing all the time. I expect most of you have already grown seeds in one or other of the ways, so I will give you a wide choice, and you can choose some of the experiments you have not tried before, leaving out the ones you already know.

There are many different seeds you may use for germinating experiments. You have probably tried the Bean, Maize, Pea, and Mustard and Cress. You can also grow Buckwheat, Sunflower, Marrow, Sweet-Pea, Sycamore, Onion, Grass, Lupin, and, of course, acorns and chestnuts in the glasses that are specially made for them. Do not stop at these seeds or fruits—gather seeds from the woods, and germinate those too. Gather them from the fields and grow little wild plants next spring! Save your date stones, and your apple and orange pips and grow those too.

You all know how a seed grows—first a root, and then a little green shoot—because you have planted seeds in your garden or in your window-box. It would be fun to see its root growing out and its shoot growing up, so you can try this experiment. It is quite an ordinary one, and if you already know it try another.

You will want a glass lamp chimney, cylindrical in shape, a saucer and a piece of clean blotting-paper. Cut the blotting-paper so that it exactly fits round the lamp glass inside. Slip it in. Stand the chimney in a saucer of water. Do you see how the blotting-paper is soaking up the water? When it gets halfway it may be very slow in getting further, so just turn the chimney upside down, and let the other half soak up quickly.

Now take some beans, which you have soaked for twenty-four hours, and slip them in between the blotting-paper and the glass. Put a little saucer or slip of glass on top of the chimney to keep the moisture in, and your experiment has begun.

Now you may easily watch the bean put out its root and its shoot, and see it grow. Draw it as it develops. You will find it very interesting.

You may grow other big seeds, such as the pea, in this way.

You will notice that I asked you to use soaked beans. Do you know why? It is because then they are in a fit state to grow. Look at a dry bean from the garden, or from the bean-bag. Isn’t it hard and small, compared with a soaked one?

SEEDS FOR YOU TO GROW

1. MUSTARD SEEDLING. 2. CRESS SEEDLING. 3. SUNFLOWER SEEDLING (note fruit-coat being cast off). 4. SYCAMORE SEEDLING. 5. PEA SEEDLING. 6. MAIZE SEEDLING. 7. WHEAT SEEDLING. 8. BEAN SEEDLING.

Did you see the beans as they were soaking? If you did you will have noticed that the skin wrinkled very much at first, and then gradually smoothed out as the bean itself took in water and swelled. Take up a soaked bean. Squeeze it. Did you see a tiny drop of water come out of a small hole at one side? Look at the little hole. It is through there that most of the water was taken up. Would you like to prove that? Very well, we will go on to another experiment.

For this we shall want two large flat corks. Take about ten beans and divide them into two equal heaps. Weigh each heap and write down their weight. Put each lot of beans on their corks, and slip a rubber band across them to hold them in place. See that one lot of beans is placed with the little holes in the seed-coats uppermost, out of the water. In the others let them be downwards so that they touch the water when the corks are floated in saucers or jars with their burden of beans.

Leave your beans for 48 hours and then remove them from their corks. Wipe them carefully and re-weigh each separate lot of beans. The batch that had their little holes touching the water will weigh more than the others. Why?

You can easily prepare a germination jar for almost any kind of seed. Get a glass jam-jar with a nice wide mouth. Cut a piece of clean blotting-paper to fit the inside of it neatly. Now get some sawdust and fill up the jar. It will press hard against the blotting-paper and keep it close against the glass. Next get some water and pour in enough to wet the sawdust and keep the blotting-paper moist. Then you may put your seeds between the paper and the glass, and watch them grow daily. The dampness from the blotting-paper gives them the moisture they need.

It is fun to put various different seeds into this germination jar, and watch how differently they grow. Would you like to do that? Draw them as they develop.

Here is a little experiment you may like to make with a few peas. Get some small corks—or cut a long cork into two or three pieces—and bore a neat hole in each one. Now put your peas one on each cork, just over the hole, and float them in a jar of water. Roots need water, and you will see your little peas putting their roots through the hole in the corks to reach the water down below! The shoot will grow upwards, of course.

The next experiment will show the whole development of a germinating seed very clearly. For this you need a wide-mouthed glass jar again and a cork to fit it. Make a hole in the cork and pass through it a knitting-needle (or long darning-needle will do). Push a soaked bean on to the end of the needle. Now put the cork in the bottle so that the bean hangs in mid-air inside the bottle, over about an inch or so of water. The water keeps the air moist enough for the bean to germinate, and you will see it sending out root and shoot in a most interesting fashion.

As you watch a seedling developing and see the root growing longer and longer, perhaps you wonder which bit of the root is the growing part. Shall we find out? It is quite easy to do so.

For this we shall want a bean that has a root about an inch long. One that has grown on a knitting-needle in our glass jar will do very well. Take it out and wipe it very carefully. Now get a bit of cotton or silk and, holding it at each end, dip the middle of it into the ink-pot. Draw the inky part across the root at the top, making a clear little mark. Now do it again a short distance above, then again and again until the whole root is marked evenly from bottom to top. Now place it carefully in your jar again.

Now you must make a careful drawing of the root, showing on it the exact number of lines, all evenly spaced. Make another drawing in forty-eight hours—and you will have found out which part of the root grows! There will be a piece of root behind the tip which has no marks at all—and that is the piece that has grown, and so made the whole root longer! Isn’t that interesting? You will be able to see this happening, if you look at the marked bean’s root carefully about every three hours.

It is useful to make a germinating box for seeds. This is how you do it. Get an ordinary wooden box without a lid. Take one side off, and get a sheet of glass to put in it slantways—i.e., the glass should slant in to the further corners, instead of being vertical as the removed side was. You can tack in two little strips of wood to keep the glass in place. Fill the glass-sided box with damp coconut-fibre or with damp sawdust, then put in your seeds, about an inch or so below the surface, resting on the slanting glass. You can then watch them germinating.

Mustard and cress are good seeds to grow because they germinate so quickly. We must really have some of them. How shall we grow them?

Well, you may scatter them in the holes of a damp sponge and let them grow there; or you may grow them on moist blotting-paper or on a piece of wet flannel.

Another way to grow mustard seeds is to soak them well, and then press them against the inside of a wet flower-pot. They will stick there. Turn the pot upside-down gently and stand it in a saucer of water. Examine the seeds in a few days. You will see that they have sent out long roots, and you will find on the roots some beautiful silky root-hairs. Hold them up to the light and see how fine they are.

It is these root-hairs that drink up the moisture which helps the baby-plant to live. All roots have them, and we might almost call them root-mouths. They fasten themselves to the earth, when they are in the ground, and when we pull up a plant we break these root-hairs. Then the root has to grow new “mouths,” and the plant may suffer. So when we move plants we must try to see that they have a ball of earth round their roots, so that the root-hairs may not be broken.

Soak some fir-cones. Shake a few grass seeds or other small seeds behind the brown scales. They will grow out and cover the cone with green.

Acorns and chestnuts are such big seeds that they are splendid for germination purposes. Grow them in the specially made glasses sold for this purpose. If these are not obtainable grow them in the necks of bottles.

DEVELOPMENT OF A GORSE SEEDLING. GROW ONE OF THESE AND SEE HOW SOME OF THE LEAVES GROW INTO THORNS

DEVELOPMENT OF A SYCAMORE SEEDLING

Grow the seeds of as many trees as you can. Ash, plane, sycamore, beech, Scots fir, hazel, holly, and so on, will all germinate. Remember to collect as many as possible in the autumn for use in the spring. They will keep well if stored in sand. Everything may be tried—it is surprising what good results can be had with apple-pips, for instance, or date-stones. The seeds of tropical trees should be started in a warm place, and when the shoot develops, which may be after some long while, the little tree should be kept indoors, not planted outside.

All germinated seeds may be planted out in the garden when finished with. Peas and beans may provide a nice crop, even if only grown in a flower-pot!

THINGS TO DO

1.

Choose which experiments you are going to make, and keep an account of them on a chart by notes and drawings.

2.

Grow a bean seed and a sunflower seed in a pot of earth. Notice how differently they grow.

3.

See if you can find some ivy berries. Grow them in a pot. Keep the earth damp but not too wet.

4.

Write down what root-hairs do.