A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2005 Processing aloe vera

Hi,
I have a very large, old, aloe plant. I had to move it recently for painters to do their job and several large pieces of it broke off. I am rooting several, but have a huge piece that I would like to extract the gel from for future use. Does anyone know how to do this and how to store it?
Thanks,
Dianec

Hi Dianec,

Anytime I've used aloe gel, I've just sliced open the piece of stem, scraped out the gel and stored it in a small, clean vial in the refrigerator.

You can even use it straight from the stem after a few hours, the stem callouses over, and you can snip that open, and use whatever's left. It lasts quite a while like that. If you want it to last for a pretty long time though *like a few months* you can do the vile thing ^.^

after the end callouses over, you can also put the stem and all in the refrigerator or freezer to prolong the life. i've done that.

Thanks all, for the suggestions for the aloe. I will give scraping it out and saving it in the frig in a jar a shot - although since I have a lot of leaves, I may put it in the food processor and then strain it! I'll let you know how it goes...
thanks again!
Dianec