The Indestructibles - 3 Plants in Cambodia You'll Love that No One Can Kill

In addition to meeting other people who are proud gardeners I’ve gotten several messages from folks who would like to be gardeners and have also been pleasantly surprised by the number of people interested in acquiring Aloe Vera plants.

Well, whether you are a seasoned veteran or new to turning dirt, there are three plants here in Cambodia that anyone can plant that are beautiful, practical, and almost completely idiot-proof.  They can be grown in the ground, in pots, or in raised beds and these plants will only ever die when you intentionally put forth a ridiculous amount of effort in order to kill them.  You can dig them up, cast them aside, forget to water them, or over water them, and pretty much nothing short of setting them on fire will actually kill them, and even then I’m not so sure.

So behold!  Here are three plants anyone can grow and be successful with!

Ginger

Many people assume that ginger itself is a root plant.  This is not true, ginger is a rhizome which means that the part we consume and which gives off that intoxicating aroma is considered an underground stem.  It will shoot off small spindly roots from the rhizome as it spreads out underground and eventually it will send up tall green shoots with leaves. 

Ginger is one of the indestructible plants because after you dig it up you can chop pieces of it off, forget about it in the refrigerator, or leave it out on the counter for weeks without actually killing the rhizome.  So long as you have a piece of ginger that is firm and holding some moisture you can just bury it in a hole and come back a few months later and find the ginger prolifically spreading out under the soil.  And once it is down in the dirt you can ignore it, forget about it, and somehow it keeps on growing whether you water it or not.  In fact, the more you water it the more it seems to grow.  Left on its own during the rainy season it will explode in all directions.

Ginger is so prolific that it only takes a tiny piece to grow an awful lot of it.  2 years ago I took two small pieces of leftover ginger from my refrigerator, buried them into 2 small pots, and 18 months later I had ginger outgrowing the limits of 15 large pots.  After harvesting most of it I’m now down to a more manageable 6 pots of ginger but if I know I will have a space I’m not going to use for a while I often will just put some ginger down in it so that when I finally am ready to use that space I can dig it up and find something special.

Even if you forget all about it, if you let it live long enough it will eventually start to send up beautiful red or pink flowers and can be kept as a decorative plant.

Pineapples

Pineapple plants are one of the ultimate indestructible plants because they are so incredibly delicious in addition to not dying no matter what you do to them.  Once you plant a pineapple plant it is somehow determined to fulfill its only mission in life, which is to produce a mouthwatering and juicy piece of fruit that is perfect for cocktails, fruit salads, cakes that defy gravity, and almost irresistible by itself.  Here in Cambodia, the pineapple plant does everything itself and has absolutely no need of your help to water it, fertilize it, or anything else.  This plant sinks roots down into the ground and just grows for several years.  This is in large part why we have so many pineapples in Cambodia.  Even though it takes several years to produce fruit, all the farmers need to do is plant a field of pineapples, which they can do for cheap, then they can do whatever else they want for the next 3 years until the plants are ready to harvest, little to no maintenance is actually needed, and unlike Casava which is similar in its low maintenance, it does not horrifically strip the soil of nutrients for future plantings.

Now, technically speaking, a pineapple plant will eventually die after you take the fruit off of it.  However, as soon as the fruit comes off the top, the roots start cloning the plant in the form of little suckers that pop up around the base of the plant.  If there are too many too close together the worst that will happen is that your next pineapples maybe smaller, but many of the suckers can be separated off and spread out to make sure you get good large fruit, but even left alone they will just keep growing.

The most amazing part of the pineapple plant though is how you can plant a new one.  If you’re feeling audacious and just want to try it for fun you can dig some seeds out of the fruit and germinate and plant them.  However, the easier way to plant a pineapple is to take hold of the leaves growing out of the top of the fruit, twist and pull them off all together from the top of the pineapple, and stick the bottom of the leaves into some dirt.  In less than 60 seconds you have a new plant.  The pineapple top will start dropping roots immediately and thus begins its mission over the next few years to grow yet another delicious pineapple.  And just adding on to its already awe inspiring aura of invincibility is that you can toss the top aside, forget about it, plant it months later and it can still somehow grow to produce a delicious mouthwatering pineapple.

These plants also look incredibly nice in pots if you wanted to have them as decorative plants while you wait for that tasty fruit!

Aloe Vera

Now this is the one that got me thinking about indestructible plants.  Several people asked about my Aloe Vera plants that I’m starting to sell and I realized they deserved to be mentioned in a blog post because they are just so dang cool, easy to grow, and amazingly indestructible.  In Khmer they are called “Kontui Grapbur” which means “Crocodile Tail.”

A couple years ago a relative of my wife came to visit my house here in Battambang and they brought along a friend.  At the time I had maybe 7 or 8 Aloe Vera plants just growing casually in a bed back by our bathrooms.  They asked if they could have a few and when we said yes they took a shovel and proceeded to dig up ALL of our Aloe Vera plants.  I haven’t a clue what they were thinking, but they were lucky I wasn’t watching and would only discover what happened well after they’d left.  They had dug up every one of the Aloe Vera plants, taken the best ones for themselves, and cast aside three small ones with disregard.

The remaining small plants probably weren’t even original plants but the small offsets that come up whenever the original plant gets big enough and had been separated from the main rootstock.  They had broken leaves and very short roots and I was (using polite words here) pissed off.  I mean, when they asked for a couple of the plants I assumed that meant 2, maybe 3, and they’d just dig up the ones they wanted.  Not dig up all my Aloe Vera plants and leave me with tiny sad little offsets.

However, Aloe Vera being the prolific and indestructible plant it is, I put the little offsets into some pots with fresh dirt and now about 2 years later they’ve grown and multiplied to the point where I’ve got several dozen healthy plants and I keep separating off more offsets to repot again and again.  A part of me imagines that if there was justice in this world that the plants this guy took are now sickly sad looking plants, but knowing what I know about Aloe Vera, I’m sure this guy has plenty of good looking plants these days.  My only consolation is the fact that apparently people want to pay me small sums of money for my plants as I keep growing them.

To be frank, even though I’ve heard it is possible, I’ve never actually grown an Aloe Vera plant from seed.  Aloe Vera plants are so prolific and easy to grow that almost any plant you will ever see is most likely just a clone offset from a much older plant.  Once in dirt, these plants will grow and grow and grow regardless of anything you might do to them.  They are considered a succulent, related to cacti, and so in the dry season they’ve got more than enough stored moisture to soldier on, and in the rainy season they just soak up water like a black hole or something.  These plants can be inundated in a flood and still survive.

So when you acquire your plant, all you need to do is put it into the ground or a pot of dirt.  It doesn’t even need to be good dirt.  Within a week or so your plant will settle into its new environment and start growing.  After a few months you will likely notice that as it gets bigger there will be small offsets coming up around the base of the original plant.  The size of your plant and number of offsets is solely dependent on the width of the container you grow in and how often you pull off the offsets.

So there is probably no action you can take to actually kill an Aloe Vera plant, but you can affect its appearance and size according to how much attention you care to give it.  A plant where you pay very little attention will keep cloning itself with little offsets and eventually just appear as a mass of small green spikey leaves.  In fact, as a child my mother had an Aloe Vera plant in a hanging planter that was almost nothing but offsets and small leaves because it was easy to break those small leaves and rub the gel on burns from when we learned important lessons like the fact that the stove was hot.

If you want a larger more impressive looking plant all you need to do is make sure it has a good, wide container to grow in and be sure to pull out the offsets regularly.  Aloe Vera plants don’t put down very deep roots so you don’t need a deep container, but they can grow remarkably large depending on how much space they have around them.*  However, if you get a burn and break off one of those huge leaves it might be more annoying to clean up the mess it can make from the goopy gel than the little bit of pain you get from a small burn in the kitchen.

So now you know the three easiest plants to grow in your home or garden in Cambodia.  Even if you know nothing about gardening and have the touch of death for any other plant you come near, even you can grow and appreciate one of these plants in your home.

*I don't have a great picture of a large Aloe Vera plant right now, but if you drive around town there are plenty of folks who have large plants.  The ones I see most frequently are out by Psar Thmey.  On the North side of Hwy 5, just by where the stoplight is for the road heading in towards the market there is a house with a line of old biscuit tins with very large Aloe Vera plants growing in them.