Would You Eat Blue Celery?

January 27, 2014 by gonetoseed 2 Comments

I’ve been busy adding some projects to the website recently and in my quest for some good photographs, we’ve been recreating several of the projects at home.  Which means that our kitchen currently resembles a Blue Peter studio.

One of the projects that’s proving a bit tricky is the old celery-stems-in-food-colouring-experiment. We’ve tried this before, with varying levels of success.

This time we started with 3 stems of celery in 3 different jars of food colouring:

And a few days later, there’s not much going on.  Some small patches of blue can be detected on the leaves if you look very closely:

And even worse; one casualty.  I think we can conclude from this that celery does not like out of date black food colouring:

Undeterred, we increased the concentration of food colouring in the remaining jars. A few more days of waiting and we were rewarded with some blue colour on the leaves (the red was noticable but not quite as dramatic):

And some great staining of the xylem when we cut thin sections of the celery stem (oooh, it took me right back to the biology lab at school for a few seconds..):

Next up is the multicoloured-rose-petals project, as seen on Pinterest. Apparently very easly done (hmmm) by stripping the rose stem into several strands and placing each one in a different jar of food colouring. We like a challenge 🙂 Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there were no takers for the blue celery at lunchtime.