Aloe Vera - droopy leaves and weird marks

[CameliaTY]

Hello, everyone.
So I'm basically a newbie with plants, and I received my first Aloe Vera last May as a gift.
She's been doing just fine, growing fast, long and beautiful.
However, winter came and its leaves are quite tender - although I water it like once every 3-4 weeks.
I noticed some marks on it, and some black dots and I was really wondering what are those.
Has anyone seen this before?
* I have to mention that I live in a flat, I keep her outside on the balcony during summer and warmer autumn days, but we've had temperatures as low as -17°C and I think that would be too harsh for it.

P.S.: Two of its older, bigger leaves became reaaally droopy and mushy. I hardly water it during this period so I'm wondering what could cause it. Can the leaves be too heavy? Or is the pot too small now? I plan to repot is as soon as spring comes.

 

[Becky]

It's good that you're not watering it much, but how much sunlight does it get? They love sunlight, and can start to get droopy without it. It's hard to tell from the photos but the pot looks too small too, so you might want to repot it.

 

[CameliaTY]

I would love to repot it, but I have been told I should wait for spring to come.
Unfortunately.. this is all the light it gets. The sun is gone during these horrible winter days ..

 

[Becky]

Ah, difficult to change geographic location! Do you have a south-facing window? That might help a little. You also want to make sure it doesn't get too cold wherever it is. You could always try a grow light if it still doesn't get enough natural sunlight.

 

[matienz]

Hello awesome people! I have a different problem, I have 4 aloes and one of them has the end of all of it's leaves, new and old, turning brown. At first I thought it might be transplant shock or sunburn, but even the new leaves growing have the same issue. I have all 4 aloes of roughly the same size and under the same conditions and only this one has this problem...

The tips on some of the old leaves are also drying out, and that does seem to be an issue with some of the leaves on all my 4 plants, but I figured that part was just normal.

I don't think I've overwatered them.

Most leaves seem fine otherwise, they're firm and fairly thick for the small size of the plant.

One of the bottom leaves on another plant became really mushy and had to be cut off, but that plant is doing the best of all 4, so I don't think it's related to this.

(nevermind the pup in the picture, that was a bad transplant without roots so it's probably going to die)

 

[matienz]

Oh I forgot to mention, it's not indoors but in a balcony, maybe this is the wrong forum for that.

Anyway, it gets plenty of sun as it's a north facing balcony with unobstructed sides too - north facing for my location is the same as south facing for most of yours, speaking of which summer just ended here

 

[matienz]

Now the brown seems to be turning more purple... And the tip of one of the leaves on another plant is also showing the same. This is under full afternoon sun. Now I'm beginning to think the sun might have something to do with it after all.

However, only 1 of the 4 plants has this problem to a significant degree and they all get the same amount of sun, if anything 2 of the others get a little bit more than this one.

 

[matienz]

Since nobody replied to me I thought I'd come back and report. My plants were extremely dry, and all they needed was more frequent watering.

I was going by popular wisdom and being so scared to overwater them, I'd only water every so often, even in the summer I'd wait 1 week, and I don't know if it's because of my extremely well draining soil consisting of 50% potting mix (dirt+compost+perlite), 15% sand, 35% gravel and breathing pot (geotextile), but these plants need way more watering than that.

Now that I've started watering them more often, they only suffer slightly when I neglect them for too long. I still wait at least 3-4 days in the summer and a bit more in the winter. When it's very cold they can probably go two weeks without watering, but other than that they need fairly frequent watering.

The two pups I removed took over two months to recover since I stripped most of their roots by being too clumsy, but they did make a full recovery and have grown into full sized plants for their smaller pots.

The four big pots are now overgrown with pups that I never took the time to remove, I just let them grow and they made the most out of the big wide and short pots I gave them (50L = 12.5 gallon each).

It's fairly amazing how the growing leaves know not to run into each other's spikes.