I Love Alcohol!!

That title ought to get the teetotalers excited!

I do love my Chardonnay, yes I do, but that is not what I am excited about at the moment.

About six or seven years ago, alcohol changed my life when Anne Lloyd sprayed some on an inkjet print that she had made using Sheer Heaven (thank you FOREVER for that one, Anne!)

Ever since, there is ALWAYS an old hair spray bottle full of alcohol not far from my hands. In fact, this one posed for me . . . while I sketched her on my iPad.

Now, the other part of this story is that I don’t kill things if I can possibly help it. As a gardener, that can be a problem – as witnessed by my ongoing gopher wars.

I actually flushed one out of a tunnel the other day and chased him all around the yard with the hose. I figured he would want to stay away now – ha! Anyway, I digress, but it was a humorous scene indeed.

You know I adopted several (16) Hibiscus plants, but you might not know that they, in turn, adopted some mealy bugs.

Mealy bugs look like the end of tiny cotton swabs, and one non-pesticide way to get rid of them is to remove them with a normal size cotton swab dipped in alcohol. One by One!

Being a person who is short of time for these things, I picked up my nearby alcohol bottle and sprayed them instead. Just the bugs, not the whole plant.

Then, I got all scared that the alcohol would hurt the plant as much as the mealy bugs (yes, alas, I did kill those bugs). So I searched online and found that some people use a mixture of 50/50 water and alcohol to spray the whole plant! So, I tried it with this spray bottle, which I also sketched for my garden journal on my iPad . . .

Here is the journal page . . .

I didn’t tell you about this trick right away, because I wanted to be sure this did not hurt the plants. I have been using it as my only pesticide for over a month and it seems to work. I don’t see any harmful affects on any of my plants. Of course, you only spray them when they are in shade.

Try this. It might be the only pesticide you need. And your plants will be germ free too!

While you’re at it, try sketching your spray bottles. It was fun and they do hold still for you!

Creativity Knocking Preview . . .

I finally got the time to make a Preview page for Volume One that gives you a lot more information about what’s in the workbook.

Here’s the link:

http://www.dotcalmvillage.net/ckpreview1.html

Huge thanks to those of you who gave me the great vote of confidence by buying it sight unseen! You are wonderful, and I am already working on Volume 2.