Aloe Farm

Greetings all,

Yesterday Gabrielle and I went with our park to Mercedes, Tx to the Aloe King Farm. It was extremely interesting. The top photo is an aloe vera field. They have about 40 acres planted in aloe. When the outer leaves get big they cut them off and sell them by the leaf....a dollar a leaf. Our guide showed us how to fillet an aloe leaf so as to just have the slippery white stuff inside the leaf. Some of the leaves are filleted and sent to factories to be made into aloe vera products, such as cosmetics and lotions. The aloe plants have suckers and these are cut and sent out as young plants. They sent 70,000 of these young plants to Uganda. Aloe plants are extremely hardy except when it comes to cold. Temperatures just above freezing will kill the plants. No pest will attack the aloe plant. They do have blossoms, but no one knows why. The blossoms do not go to seed, so they seem to serve no purpose.

They also grow citrus fruits, papaya and avocado on this farm, mostly for their own use.

J.R. Sigrist and his wife own the farm. She is 86 and he is 87 years old. He is also known as "The Sandman" as he does sand art. They collect different colored sand from all over the world. He was explaining that there is no blue sand, but there is sand of all the other colours. Green sand is becoming difficult to find. We watched as he made a bottle of his sand art. He packs the sand so tightly that even if you roll the bottle the artwork stays intact. He then seals each bottle with wax before putting on the lid. It was something to watch!

His wife runs the gift store and does a presentation on the history of the farm. She was a pure delight!

It was a great day.