Custom Soil For Successful Aloe Vera Plants

Custom Soil For Successful Aloe Vera Plants

By Joseph Parish

Since we will be planting some Aloe Vera stalks in the near future here at “Our Little Plot of Land”, I thought it would be a good time to once again play the role of amateur plant scientist and do some soil experiments. Today I am experimenting with an ideal soil for rooting aloe Vera cuttings in. The usual types of soil recommended are those with sand in them or soils specifically created for raising cactus in.

I could very well have purchased a store-bought soil which would have the proper nutrients necessary for the plant's growth or for its complete development. The problem with this idea is that this type of soil may not be suited for a picky aloe Vera plant.

Aloe Vera are native to the African continent and as such are accustomed to living in a dry, rocky, open area which is exposed to abundant sunlight and vast amounts of heat. The leaves of the plant tend to retain water with the root system being horizontal in nature in order to catch the scarce water from its native desert like environment. The aloe Vera is not functionally equipped for survival in neither wet or cold climates. This creates a need to accustom the plant to the environmental conditions of your home. To accomplish this task, you must provide a soil mixture that is close to that found in its native homeland which has low water content.

One of the best combinations that you can create is that of using half Potting Soil and half sandbox sand. This mixture is the easiest and least expense of the mixtures to consider. For my experiment, I will simply mix equal parts of potting soil and sand to create an aloe Vera mix.

Some people have added perlite to their mix to enable it to maintain a measure of moisture and aeration in the plant pot. I will be using my normal half potting soil and half sand and combine half peat moss to it after which I will mixing the combination well.

Ingredients:

1 cup sand

1 cup potting soil

1 cup of peat moss

This recipe will still provide high moisture retention with sufficient aeration. The bad part of using a sand-based recipe for the plant soil is that the food supply will decrease. What this means is the plant will not receive any of the nutrients that it normally would get from the regular full-strength potting soil. To compensate we will need to repot the plant more often than if we used plain soil or we will need to use a weak fertilizer solution to feed it on a regular basis. Excellent choices would include a slow-release fertilizer pellet application such as Osmocote. Avoid the use of compost in order to solve the issue of the low nutrient levels. Compost contains an abundance of organic components which tend to increases the soils moisture level.

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