Orange Crush

At the beginning of summer, I decided to separate and re-pot the overgrown aloe plant I bought about 6 years ago. It had been growing gangbusters for many years and I read several "how to" essays from the internet, bought special soil for succulents and spent the afternoon dividing and potting. I had re-potted before, but left the plant intact.

I ran out of pots and decided to take the original part of the plant, now huge and gangly, and put it into a pot with one of my Wandering Jew plants. I thought of it as the battle of the cockroach plants since both of them seemed to be unkillable. But, since the pot was going to hang out on my porch, I figured the aloe was doomed to die. The Wandering Jew would take over and the aloe would get too much rain and sun.

Today I brought all my plants inside, it is cold enough that frost is bound to come any night now. Both the aloe and the Wandering Jew are doing fine, but all of my other aloe plants are mostly dead. I did NOT overwater them at the time of re-pot, and have barely watered any of them since, but they have become all bloated and black in spots, the roots have rotted away. It is as if the soil had too much nutrient and the plants sucked them all up at once. At least once a week all summer, i wake up to find a fleshy aloe limb plopped down on my floor. Sometimes I hear them drop in the middle of the night.

Every time I have to throw a limb away, it makes me sad. I feel guilty and I want to know what I did wrong. There is something much worse about throwing a piece of big, juicy plant in the garbage can than there is about throwing crusty and dried up plant away. The limbs feel alive but amputated.

Not long ago, I watched the first segment of the Time-Life series on Vietnam and learned that Agent Orange worked by mimicking plant growth hormone that induced rapid, uncontrolled growth in the plants. I have to say, thoughts of Agent Orange; Vietnam; and fleshy, amputated limbs that plop on the ground in the middle of the night make for some bad nights of sleep.