BuildASoil Horticultural Aloe

Alongside our own heavy metal testing, Process NMR Associates ran proton NMR on this material. NMR is useful here because it sees everything in the sample at once, which means it shows what is missing as clearly as what is present. Aloe powder is a category with real adulteration problems, so the empty column matters as much as the numbers.

Proton NMR, Process NMR Associates. Report prepared by John C. Edwards, PhD, reviewed by Paul Giammatteo, PhD. Lactic acid was present at 0.62 percent and acetic acid at 0.18 percent.

Those breakdown compounds in the right column are what shows up when aloe sits after cutting. Finding almost none of them is the closest thing there is to a preservation record.

An aloe leaf is three things. An outer rind, a yellow inner skin just beneath it, and the clear gel in the middle. Anthraquinones and anthrones concentrate in that yellow inner layer.

Aloe headed for food and beverage goes through decolorization, which strips those compounds out because of the laxative effect. What is left is the clear inner gel you see in a drink. This powder skips that step and keeps the whole leaf, which is why it is dark rather than clear.

The isocitrate and isocitrate lactone in the lab panel are the whole leaf markers. They are how a lab tells whole leaf material apart from filleted gel.

You can, and it is free, and that is not nothing. Plenty of growers have done it for years and gotten results. If you want to cut a leaf and blend it into your watering can, go ahead.

What you give up is repeatability. One leaf of unknown age from one plant in one set of conditions, used once, with no way to reproduce it next month. A grocery store fillet is further off, because it was cut some unknown number of weeks ago and has been degrading since, and it is inner fillet only with the rest already discarded.

This is the same plant at a known concentration, from mature field grown leaf, whole, with lab work behind it. One teaspoon per gallon, the same every time.

We learned this way of growing from Clackamas Coot. He was teaching people to put aloe in the watering can back when almost nobody was, and that is what sent us looking for the best aloe we could find rather than the most convenient one.

What we found traces back to a tomato farm next to an aloe farm. The aloe farm had waste material to get rid of, the tomato farm put it in the ground, and their tomatoes came in better than anything they had grown.

That observation is what led to work on aloe as an agricultural input rather than a human product, and to the finding that the useful material was in the whole leaf rather than the filleted gel. All of that early work was aimed at commercial agriculture, at field crops and orchards.

Bringing it to home growers is where we came in. We were the first to sell it as a finished product for the watering can rather than for a hundred acre spray program, and we have been selling and teaching it for over a decade. Everything on this page comes out of running it here, in our own garden, at the rates we publish.

Aloe is not the engine of your garden. The soil is. This is something you add to the water on top of a soil that is already built and already being fed. If your plants are struggling and the soil has never been amended, start there and come back to this.

For how much of what and when, run your garden through the BuildASoil feed schedule calculator, or read The Complete System.

If you need any of this for a compliance file, email support@buildasoil.com.

See how we publish lab work across the catalog on our batch testing page.