Deconstructing Aloes

Well, at the end of summer-beginning of fall 2012 time frame, I finally decided to break down these two big pots of spiky aloes.  My mother had been badgering me to throw them in the yard waste bin for years, but I really like the flower spikes they produced in spring and summer.  Hummingbirds are also drawn to the honeysuckle-type flowers like crazy.  Furthermore, like I said, the aloes are spiky, which translates into a lot of “ouchy” for any re-potting effort–and there is no way on earth I’m trashing perfectly good aloes that are ALIVE and HEALTHY in my backyard.  It basically took my daughter urging me to get rid of them for me to get the job done.  This is what the pots looked like originally–mind you, these two pots were here from the previous house owners.

The third pot at the bottom right contains two units of another type of aloe I bought at Lowe’s.  Go ahead and say a prayer for the dead, because those two plants are long gone.

Step one involved dumping one of the pot’s contents onto the floor, dirt and all, and then using various gardening tools to pry the individual plants apart.  It goes without saying I was wearing gardening gloves, right?

Somewhere along the way, a gladiolus seed made its way into one of the aloe pots and thrived.  Here it is buried in all the roots and dirt of the aloe pot after I’d already pried apart a bunch of the plants.

Here’s one of the granddaddies of the aloe bunch.

Here are photos of adolescents and babies.

These plants can grow inside the pot among the roots, without any light!  I virtually NEVER watered these plants, so whatever they got, they got from the sky, or morning dew, whatever.  I transferred the adult plants into the ground in the backyard–we’ll see how that goes, but I figure they gotta be hardy survivors if they can thrive in a pot untouched for years.  The younger ones were placed in pots.

Sometimes the plants that do the best are the plants you touch the least.  We’ll see.