Grow Your Own Cress Egg Head
Learn how to plant your own delicious cress in funny egg heads and take time to discover the amazing science behind it.
What you need:
Cotton wool
Egg shells
Pencil and pen
Cress seeds
Water spray bottle
Egg cups or an empty egg carton
What to do:
Clean empty eggshells in water and leave to dry.
Place eggshells in egg cups, or you could keep them in an egg carton.
Draw faces on your eggshells.
Try a different expression for each face.Fill your egg shells with cotton wool.
We pulled our cotton wool to make it fluffier and bigger so that there was more surface area for the seeds to sit on top of.Moisten the cotton wool using a water spray bottle.
You could also dip one end into water and let the water travel up through it.Scatter your seeds on top of the wool, leave to grow in a semi shaded, warm area and keep them moist by watering daily with the spray bottle.
The cress should be fully grown and ready to eat in about a week.
Just snip the stems and enjoy in an egg sandwich, in salad, with cheese and crackers or as a garnish.
What we learn…
Plants need water, air, sunlight and nutrients to be able to survive...
Water: The roots act as an anchor for the plant and absorb water and essential minerals from the cotton wool or soil around it.
This is carried up into the stem and leaves to give water to the whole plant.Nutrients: In this case, the cotton wool we have planted the seeds on does not have nutrients for these plants, but the seeds have enough nutrients for them to grow to a size that is edible for us.
Air: The leaves contain small pores or holes called Stomata which the air can pass through.
Plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen into the air, this is called respiration and is also important for us because we need oxygen to breath.Sunlight: In order to grow plants need sunlight.
A green chemical in the leaves of plants (called chlorophyll) absorbs sunlight and converts it into chemical energy to help the plant grow. This process is called photosynthesis.
Ideas for experiments:
Here are a few ideas of some tests you can carry out with your egg heads: light vs dark, soil vs cotton wool and water vs no water.
There must only be one variable (one thing different) between the plants you are testing on.
For example if you wanted to see how a plant grows in the dark you should also test how it grows in the light but everything else including the air, water, size of container etc. should be the same.
