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There is an amazing range of plants you can grow at home—all from the fruit and vegetables scraps you probably have in your kitchen—to create your own windowsill jungle. Many of our favourite foods are seeds, bulbs, tap roots or the tubers of plants, that you can easily encourage to grow. Let us see how they differ.
- A seed is the dispersal part of a plant. As well as the embryo (which grows into the new plant), it also has a supply of food.
- A bulb consists of a short stem surrounded by fleshy leaves that act as food storage organs during dormancy.
- A tap root is a large central root that is also used as a storage organ. Tubers are swollen underground stems also used for food storage. Which one might a cucumber be?
To grow any plant successfully, they need to have four requirements: sunlight, the right temperature, soil and water.
Source: Local Safari, The Jane Goodall Institute Australia, 2020, page 112.
(Copyright: Australian Science Teachers Association 2021, except where indicated otherwise. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.)