Tropical Storm Rick really gave the vegetation in Mazatlán a beating.  Walking the dogs this morning I realized that the west  side of every tree we passed by was burned and blackened or bleached looking.

A lot of the plants at our house are in pots, and those most affected by the storm were on our upstairs front patio.  Keep in mind that as the crow flies we are about 4 blocks from the water but we are behind Icebox Hill, which shelters us from a lot of the weather.  Our timber bamboo really took a beating, though.  Planted in the ground on the side of our back yard, it has grown to more than three stories high and provides a nice buffer between us and the aparment building behind.  Or I should say it used to.  Whether it will even survive at all is anyone’s guess.  I cut off the stems (bamboo is a grass, after all) that had bent over today, but it is as though more than half of the bamboo is missing and the remaining leaves are shredded and dry.

I thought I’d do this post now and we’ll see how we are doing in a couple of months.

Here’s the bamboo I had to cut out.  See how dry and shredded the leaves are?  They are a bluish color, very strange.

Here’s the bamboo, now.  We assume it will send up more shoots but we don’t know if the existing bamboo will re-leaf.

This is my edible ginger.  It is not normally variegated.  That happened during the storm.

My fig.  It is in a pot and had been doing pretty well.  I have my fingers crossed!

The banana and the orchid tree seem a little off kilter.

Awwww, crap.  This is my datura.  It is really unhappy.

This vine was doing so well, before.  It is  a flame vine and it hasn’t even bloomed yet! It was draping over the front facade of our house and was going to be quite the show!

This tree was sold to us as a real lemon.  Ok, it isn’t, it seems to be an orange, but we’re not even sure we’ll ever get those oranges, it is doing so badly.  I have no idea why they didn’t fly off in the storm, either.

Above is my handkerchief plant.  It was so lush and had tons of blooms on it, before!.

Here’s the banana after I cut off the big one that went down.  Kinda ratty, don’t you think?

We haven’t been through this kind of storm before, so we are no experts, but next time we are going to be ready with a heavy duty handtruck and move all the plants on the patio into a corner and if possible cover them with a tarp.  But the plants that were more exposed did worse, so whatever shelter we can give them, we will.

We’ll also hose them off as soon as the storm passes.  In hindsight we realized that some of the damage was caused by the salt in the moisture, and if we had hosed them off, who knows - they might have done better.

Our neighbors shrug and say who could expect two storms like we had this year in ONE year!  So we hope next year we will get a pass, and that the storm season is over for us for this year. One thing I should have expected is that the palms did quite well.  They flap up and down and get whipped all over the place but don’t even look slightly affected by the storm.

Below is a video of the front patio during a bit of the storm.

A couple of months from now I’ll let you know how it’s going with all these plants. Wish me luck!