Day 50 - Harvest Aloe Gel

Date: February 25th, 2010

In our continuing series that I will call "Accidental Plant Week", I went over to my parents' house again to play around in their indoor garden. When I went to pot the flowers, my dad mentioned that they had to cut some large stalks off their aloe plant. It was getting too big to fit in the room and he'd found a way online to gather gel from the plant. If you've ever gotten a sunburn, you'll know the cool, soothing, neon green joy that is aloe vera.

I was surprised at a couple things. The first was how easy harvesting the aloe gel was and the second was how quickly I was able to finish the whole stalk. The process was only a few steps - cut off the 'branch', cut the tip off it, slice it in half longways and then use a grapefruit spoon to scrape out the gel. It was gross, but in the same way that Nickelodeon slime is gross. I felt like a six-year-old again... it was great getting my fingers all goopy.

Like most things, Lucy believes this will taste good.

I don't know if any of you, ya know, blog-reading-type-people, have met my parents, but if you have, you'll know that they are deeply serious people. They never laugh or smile, for that would be a sign of weakness. Moreover, not once have they ever done something beneath them, like being "goofy". Goofy is a Disney dog, they'd always say. That's their motto. No no, never, never would they laugh, or joke or kid around...

...or play Bonnie & Clyde with an aloe stalk...

...or, I don't know, smoke it... I guess...

Well, nevermind then. They may be silly and immature, but I'd never sink to that. Not in a million years. I'm a law student, soon to be a lawyer. I have business cards, gosh darnit!

Oh, right, we took pictures.

At least mine looked dignified. See each of those off-shoots from the main stalk? Each one was individually cut off, fileted and scraped clean of the delicious delicious jelly inside. Actually, I have no idea if its delicious. Its aloe. Its for burns, not tongues. I mean, I guess theoretically if you burn your tongue you could taste it, but that just seems silly, now doesn't it?

Like I said before, harvesting the aloe was fun in that goopy-childhood-project kind of way. It was also quite rewarding. There are not a lot of ingredients in over the counter aloe gel other than the gel itself and some food coloring. The active ingredient is the aloe itself. So, basically, we have an at-home herbal remedy sitting in the fridge. I think that's fantastic.

Give me some of that aloe, Vera.