i got a microscope for christmas can someone tell me how to grow something in a petri dish so i can look at it

Question

i have some agar and the petri dishes and tubes and slides ive looked at pond water and all kinds of things around the house but i want to look at more and i cant fund a book for dumies to help me learn to look at some stuff fast please help if you know

Answer 1

I had a microsope, and one of my favorite things to look at was organisms in pondwater. Just get a clean glass jar and about a spoonful of muck or a few stems of plants that live in the water. Just sit it on a sunny windowsill and they'll reproduce. You can get the water out with a medicine dropper or turkey baster (don't use it for anything else after you've used it in the pondwater!) and put a drop on the slide.

Here's a link that may help you identify what you find: http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/wimsmall/smal1.html

Answer 2

Hello,
You are a very lucky person! Microscopes are great!

So easy to grow stuff to look at in your dish. Just take some bread, put a drop of water on it. Leave it alone. Same with cheese and other foods found around your house.
Go get some soil, outside dirt nothing special. If you put a seed any old seed, you can watch it germinate and grow.

Have fun with your new "toy" :0)

Answer 3

Here's a really easy one. Prepare an agar/petri dish. Lick it (or spit on it - less gross factor). Put the dish somewhere warm for a couple of days and you should have some nice bacterial colonies. yummy! :P

You can do this with anything, really - just swab whatever you think might have bacteria with a popsicle stick or a q-tip, rub the stick/q-tip on your prepared petri dish and let it grow somewhere warm a couple of days.