A few weeks ago I did a post chronicling my attempt to make rainbow roses for Valentines day. It didn’t go quite the way it was supposed
to, so me, being the problem solver I am, decided to figure out what went
wrong. Sure I could probably Google it, but where’s the fun in that?
I bought another dozen white roses now that the price was a
much more reasonable $10 (amazing what a difference a week makes…). Using the
same Hard Rock Café shot glasses, I divided the roses into three groups:
Indoors near a window, Inside the garage (with little natural light) and
outside. Since I had extra roses, I did an additional experiment to see if
there was a difference between tap water and filtered water, and I threw plant
food in a third, just because.
Color Experiment:
I used a razor and did two separate roses for each room. One
with a single dye (Blue) and another split in two, with two dyes (Orange and
Green). I decided to use the same colors for each room, which turned out to
produce some surprising results.
24 Hours:
 |
| 24 Hours |
According to the You Tube Video, you’re supposed to see some
results in a few hours and nearly full colored petals after 24 hours.
The window flowers showed some slight coloration, but I noticed the leaves
seemed to be getting more color than the flowers. I pruned the leaves to see if
it made a difference.
The garage flowers also had color, but the flowers were
already losing petals.
The outdoor flowers had similar coloring, but looked a bit
healthier.
48 Hours:
 |
| 48 Hours |
The 2-color indoor flowers showed significant improvement,
and only had a single stray petal. The single blue color, however, seemed to
be rapidly killing the flower. It looked horrible and petals were all over the
place.
Inside the garage was a similar story, however both of the
flowers had petal loss.
Outside had the best results; at least for the two tone. The
colors were the best of the three, but I think the direct sunlight dried out
the petals a bit. The single blue, looked much worse, however. At some point,
the flower fell over, but it shared the same dramatic petal loss.
Different Waters (Side experiment):
 |
| Top is filtered. Middle is plant food. Bottom is tap water. |
Since I had a few extra roses, I did a side experiment with
different types of water. For some reason, the roses I’ve been purchasing
lately haven’t held up as long as the ones I bought 4-5 months ago. It may be
because of the time of year, but I wanted to eliminate water from the equation.
I created three separate waters: Tap water, Filtered Water,
and Filtered water plus plant food.
Nothing majorly dramatic occurred as a result of this
experiment. The tap water rose didn’t seem to open up as much as the filtered
water, but the filtered water’s petals were beginning to wilt. Unsurprisingly,
the one with the food looked the best, but not by a very wide margin.
Conclusion:
I decided that there was little to gain by continuing this
experiment another day. I grabbed the best of the bunch (i.e. the ones still
living) and consolidated them into a vase.
The Outdoor flowers seemed to do the best, followed by the
indoor flowers. The garage ones had similar color saturation, but the lack of
sunlight seems to have sped the demise of the roses. The only issue I noticed
was the outdoor ones seemed to be noticeably drier than the indoor and garage ones.
Temperature was a non-factor for the most part because the weather outside was
very similar to the temp inside. |
| This was the GOOD blue dye flower |
The biggest surprise was the blue food coloring. I dunno
what’s in it, but it seems to be toxic to roses. All of the blue roses
suffered major petal loss, though interestingly, the garage one suffered the
least. Possibly because they drank less because it was cooler/less light in there.
I’d like to have one more stab at this before calling it
completely busted. Somehow the people on the internet got it to work. I’m
wondering if it’s just not a good batch of roses, or if they’re too “old” by
the time I get them. Maybe I can try and find some before they start blooming.
For now, however, it looks like I’m going to have to order
them if I want to surprise my girlfriend with rainbow roses next Valentine’s
day.
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