1) During the 1600s, tulips were so valuable in Holland that their bulbs were worth more than gold. The craze was called tulip mania, or tulipomania, and caused the crash of the Dutch economy. Tulips can continue to grow as much as an inch per day after being cut.
2) A sunflower looks like one large flower, but each head is composed of hundreds of tiny flowers called florets, which ripen to become the seeds. This is the case for all plants in the sunflower family, including daisies, yarrow, goldenrod, and many others.
3) The first potatoes were cultivated in Peru about 7,000 years ago.
4) Compost can be made in a number of ways, from simply piling up old plant material, to using complicated plastic bins.
5) Plants have many ways of spreading or dispersing their seeds.
- Gravity - heavy seeds will just fall off the plant.
- Wind - very fine seeds will blow away on the wind. Some seeds have special parachutes or wings to help them fly, for example, dandelions.
- Hooks - the seeds are covered with hooks which catch on to a passing animals' fur; they then catch a free ride to another place where they are rubbed off later.
- Animals - the seeds look like tasty treats for the animals to eat, but they pass undigested through the animal. Animals, including birds and insects, sometimes bury the seeds.
- Floating - some seeds grow with air trapped in them, so they can float away from the parent plant.
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