Fracking Blight!

It's one thing to have to deal with little aphids on your plants but mealybugs (not related to mealworms) constitute a true blight!  These tiny little bugs have a hard exoskeleton that makes them relatively impossible to kill when they go after your indoor plants.  They nibble along areas where leaves and stems connect along with along the stems/leaves themselves essentially cutting the extremities of the plant off from it's nutrients and water.

Outdoors, the solution is to release ladybugs that will each eat about 100 mealybugs a day...  Woot!  But indoors, you either have to resort to horticultural chemicals or detergents that can kill your plants as well.  You can also use things such as rubbing alcohol to clean the leaves and stems of your plants in a mild infection.  However by the time you notice the bugs, it usually is due to your plant dropping leaves and noticing white fuzzy patches on the leaves and stems.  This fuzzy white sap is secreted by the bug to protect itself and in the case of female bugs, it can contain their offspring.  At this point, the plant has usually been coated by the bugs and the only way to save the plant is to take a clipping that is uninfected and try to root it.  And it should be noted that any plant brought in from outside can be infected with these nasty little beasts.

So why all this talk about nasty parasitic bugs?  This past weekend I found that one of my favorite plants that I got last year was infected (see all photos above).  Sadly, just a week prior I was going to start trimming the dead bits off and had not noticed the bug at all.  You might say, well maybe you didn't notice it bc you didn't know what it looked like.  Sadly no, I know it quite well as it killed two of my other plants last fall and if I would see anything white on a leaf, I would have freaked out as I did saturday.  As with the last time, I had to sacrifice this white and pink geranium to the trash gods after I took a little snipet from it's clean side to try to root.  I just hope that I caught this before any of the gnat like males flew off to kill the rest of my houseplants.

Anybody else ever find an uninvited pest killing off your houseplants in the middle of winter when there should have been no exposure to insects?  What did you do to kill them off?  Or did you just end up having to get rid of the plant?

Every Bride Needs Some Eyelets

As I began my quest to design our own wedding invites, I decided it would be cute to gocco a bunch of sunflowers tied with a bow on the front. Then I decided it would be even sweeter if the bow around the flowers was a real ribbon. The bow would serve both form and function! Well, it lacked heavily in the function part. While it held my two sheets together without the need of glue, it failed to hold them firmly. So when the invite it held upright, gravity takes the top page and swings it down at an angle. FAIL!

Now not wanting to have to toss my bow idea away or have to determine the best glue to use from my glue box, I decided to try a variation of the ribbon. As bridal bouquets are not simply tied once around the middle but the ribbon wraps several times, I could make my ribbon zig zag down the paper where the stems will be.  This did have great function as it held the paper tightly together but it was totally lacking in beautiful form.  The bow only covers the holes at the top of the zig zag leaving the ones near the bottom to look less than ideal.  Even if the ribbon was laced loosely, you could still see through the invite and it looked more like a 3rd grade project than a formal invitation.  FAIL #2!

So I kicked around ideas of what to do for the next few days after that...  I could just glue the top sheet to the bottom but then that completely takes away my desire to layer reception info under the wedding info.    I could glue the edges under where the bow will sit but I had decided originally that I didn't want to glue the invites.  With 150-200 needing to be made, that would be a lot of drying time if there were glue sticks involved or a lot of glue tape packs to be bought (the alternative/more costly/faster route I would choose).  Then while digging through my basket of wind-catcher materials I found copper eyelets I bought a month prior from Wildcard with the purpose of using them in a bookmark project that was put aside for wedding tasks.  At this point I had nothing to loose and decided that maybe a hammered on eyelet can hold my sheets in place.

What do you know, it actually worked!  All it took were two eyelets in the holes for the ribbon.  And banging some eyelets in place with a hammer will surely serve as a great stress reducer too!  So I took to ordering just a few anodized ones!

I think every bride needs some eyelets to hammer away at, don't you?