How I Loved An Aloe Plant To Death

I am not the worst anymore. Which is not much to brag about. It simply means I don’t kill all plants in my immediate vicinity anymore. I even grew and harvested strawberries and about 5 tiny potatoes and really hardy, stringy broccoli at one point on my own. Largely on my own, that is. I actually even harvested way too many string beans at one point and I gave all of them away because I don’t even like string beans all that much. I don’t know what possessed me to invest so much of my land to beans. Beans for brains I have, honestly.

But the first plant I started with as an amateur gardener was an aloe plant. My mother who knew about my black thumb was horrified at the thought of me tending to a plant. She also didn’t want me to fail. So she racked her brain for the easiest, lowest maintenance plant she knew that wouldn’t offend me. In the end, she told me to buy one of those small pots of succulents. I chose an aloe. I said: it is medicinal too, and it will come in handy.

I loved that aloe plant, god rest its soul. I didn’t know the first thing about gardening and plant care. I refused to Google. What I knew was that people often fed plants fertilizers, killed pests with insecticides, weeded it and watered it, and often re-potted them. I took great delight in feeding it manure and fertilizers. I watered it daily without fail. Every few days, I re-potted it. We had goldfish at the time which is to say we bought a lot of goldfish because they kept dying. Every time a goldfish died, I would take its dead body, carefully lift my aloe plant out of its pot, dumped the corpse in the soil and then replanted the aloe. For bio-manure, you see. Over time, the green started to fade into a dull colour. I took this to mean more zealous love – feed it more manure and transplant to bigger pots every other day (more soil, more nutrients?) and water and lots of direct sunlight. For chlorophyll.

It is a testament to how strong an aloe is that it lasted my gentle, loving care for multiple weeks. But of course, no plant is strong enough to last that many re-pottings that frequently, and no desert plant needs water that much that its pot was often waterlogged. I don’t know about the fish manure and the other store-bought manure but probably they couldn’t do their job with my constant helicopter parent interference. When my aloe plant died, the green had faded into a somewhat sickly brown and it was sticky and sort of fungal from all the rotting from all the water I lovingly poured into the pot every day.

It is a good reminder of how incredibly stupid I am on my own. Which is one reason why I ask a lot of questions these days now to avoid more metaphorical aloe deaths in my care. Also, I just buy plastic flowers now. They are easy to maintain. They don’t need to be watered or fed anything. If they get dirty, I just wash them with laundry detergent. Perfect.

I still kill all wall clocks in every home I stay in. I can’t explain. They just die.