The science of killing cacti with alcohol

A cactus thrives on vodka.

I gained this priceless piece of information from my high school science fair project. It’s vital to know if you’re ever in the desert, need to kill some cacti, and have access to nothing except a bottle of Absolut. I’m here to tell you: Don’t even bother.

I remembered my abortive career as a wannabe plant killer while my daughter and her friend worked on their own science fair project earlier this week. They are researching which detergent best removes lipstick stains from clothing, a topic of vital importance to business executives and their collars since the invention of the secretary in the late nineteenth century.

(Which sounds more like the premise for a bad episode of “Bewitched” than a science project, but I digress.)

Undoubtedly, my brighter classmates gleaned much more from their experiments. They were like Jimmy Neutrons to my Bart Simpson, performing groundbreaking research in smart topics like quantum physics and hydroponics while I labored in vain to keep stenciled letters from smearing on my poster board.

It didn’t help that I waited until the last minute and then fabricated all the research. 

Backdating my log entries to give the appearance of being an intrepid young scientist probably took longer than doing the experiments correctly, but it’s exactly what I did, bleary-eyed one Sunday night at the kitchen table, desperately trying to make “The Effect of Alcohol on Household Plants” match my hypothesis.

My first mistake, of course, was waiting until ten days before the project was due to begin the experiment, even though my “log” indicated I had been working on it for two months.

My second mistake was being too cheap to buy appropriate plants. Some petunias or daffodils would have succumbed easily to alcohol poisoning, I bet. Instead, I used a cactus we had around the house, a stunted little thing that my mom was willing to sacrifice in the name of science and a passing grade in biology class.

Except the damn thing refused to die.

I drowned it in vodka, pouring so much into the pot that it overflowed into the kitchen sink. I put it in the closet, reasoning the absence of light would help it die sooner. Wrong.

It didn’t even appear sickly, but stayed a bright, happy shade of green, enjoying its vodka ablutions and looking as healthy and toned as a supermodel.

This can’t be, I remember thinking. Alcohol is deadly to all life, a lesson I learned from staring endlessly at slides of diseased, pickled livers in health class. I can’t walk into school with a cactus thriving on a daily diet of poison.

Finally, in desperation, I poured bleach into the pot. That did the trick, but only barely.

I remember the sinking feeling the day my class presented their projects. All around me were Einsteins who had solved the mysteries of perpetual motion, created lasers in their backyards or built cars that ran on grass clippings, and here I was with an albino cactus (the Clorox bleached the green away) and a project more appropriate for fourth grade.

Even my poster board, which I had to roll up to take on the school bus, looked lame, propped against the classroom wall with one corner drooping, a pathetic but apt symbol of ineptitude.

I stammered through my presentation, tried not to look too guilty when my teacher sniffed the cactus, and collected my C+ (a mercy grade – only kids who didn’t do a project at all scored lower). 

In retrospect, I should have reported the findings accurately. I may have been on the cusp of an exciting discovery, that vodka was linked somehow to immortality, the hitherto mythical fountain of youth in a glass bottle.

Instead, I threw away a promising career by fabricating my results, perhaps anticipating a similar scandal late last year involving a South Korean researcher and his bogus cloning report.

I hope my daughter hasn’t inherited my anti-science gene, and that her experiments in lipstick removal are more aboveboard.

Which leaves me to wonder: What effect might vodka have on lipstick stains, other than a person is more likely to get them after a heavy bout of drinking?

I wonder if anybody would fund my research into that topic. 

Originally published in 2006.