Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi,

My daughter is (attempting) to grow rock candy crystals for her science fair experiment. We set up the experiment monday night, and the strings are saturated, but no crystals yet from what we can see. Is this normal? Did we do something wrong? The only difference I see in the recipe we used and the one on SB site is that we did not preheat the mason jars. Could this be why? We did not seed the strings. We were planning to do that with new strings after the original ones had a week to grow, to compare seeding to duration (two weeks for unseeded, one week for seeded). Thanks for your help!

Sorry, you are in the cross your fingers and wait and see point in the project. Pre-seeding definitely speeds up the process.