this-is-me-and-mine-deactivated asked: I live in the south in the US and have started a little collection of aloes and succulents. I want to have them in a garden one day as pretty accents but I'm afraid to put them outside. I almost killed my aloe by leaving it outside in the heat earlier this year. How do yours grow outside as well as they do and what do you do with them in the winter?
I grow just one mama aloe and a few pups in a sunny window, and I use it for burns. It’s the easiest thing to have on hand for first aid if you accidentally scald yourself (but don’t eat it — more and more studies show they are toxic)!
As far as I understand (succulents are not my specialty, so you may want to ask someone like cactguy or cacticonnoisseur to get a second opinon) heat shouldn’t be an issue, as this is plant that has been naturalised in deserts around thew world.
It’s possible you killed it with kindness and gave it too much water, or that there was an unseasonably cold night and the plant suffered a shock by having it’s environment shifted too rapidly. Other than that, I should think that if you have a good amount of heat and sun, you shouldn’t have any problems growing aloes outdoors in the summertime. Just harden them off gradually with a few hours outdoors every day for two weeks if you are worried about shock.
It could also be transition of the placement as well as their climate! If my previous readings are not mistaken, in more temperate areas most succulents prefer full sun, but in more tropical regions many succulents actually prefer some shade to handle the heat better, so it would be worth testing if they’d do better in shadier spots outside. Also as you said yourself biodiverseed, plants of any kind that come from indoors should be transitioned from indoors to outdoors slowly to harden them off to the stronger sun and change of environment. Even the toughest succulent can get severe sunburn if brought to hotter and sunnier places too quickly.
A little bit of both here for me: in the spring they can easily get burnt, so I gradually move them to their sunnier summer locations. But, as summer progresses, they need partial shade (some more than others).
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cactguy reblogged this from kihaku-gato and added: A little bit of both here for me: in the spring they can easily get burnt, so I gradually move them to their sunnier...
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