Good afternoon, Steemians!

Some of you might be aware that we evacuated our house in SW Florida and went to Rosemary Beach, in the panhandle, near Panama City Beach. Some of our trees fell, but I have been able to save them due to using sandbags to pick them bag up and allow roots to grow to stabilize them again.

One of our jackfruits being held up by a sandbag

All three of our moringa trees fell and I thought were severely damaged after the storm. One in the backyard didn't make it, but I have pictures here of how the other two from the front yard are bouncing back and better than ever.

I basically had to pick the trunk all the way up, back to its upright position (roots were broken)and then put a sandbag there to keep it from falling back down - (now a bag of compost does the trick)

I thought this technique would be unsuccessful, because usually you can't just stand trees back up and have them grow again after they've fallen, but I remembered how resilient moringa (the miracle tree) is.

I decided to cut all of the existing branches off and actually cut the trunk off really short. This can be done with the Indian variety and usually the tree will continue to live and put out new growth.

Tree number two

Here is that Moringa tree and our house right after we returned after the hurricane.

Here is a picture of today

This was one of the trees a week ago

The other one

We actually got very lucky because I was able to use the same technique with most of our trees. We did lose one mango tree, the third Moringa, and a few banana "trees", but actually most of them are fine! I think we also lost one yuca plant too. It's ok though, we still have a house!

Bananas today

This soursop tree made it because I did the same thing: I put a sandbag (50 pounds) down in the way of letting the trunk of the tree fall again. Naturally, roots should grow and I will be able to take the sandbag away like I did with the Moringa

Here it is today!

Guava tree that I was sure was dead

Nature is truly incredible, Steemians, and I'm proud that my little homestead was able to make it through Irma... it could've been a lot worse. Thanks for stopping by!