Well - today is the day! We've had about 7 inches of rain in the last 10 days. I thought I had my plants out of the water, but this one was getting spill over from the gutters. Darn! Wish I had notice that sooner!

Yes, the soil is also crummy. You can see the culprit in the background. I didn't even add perlite. When I unpotted the plant I could literally squeeze water out of it.

There is plenty of rot. I am furious with myself!

Here is a close up look. I have already removed a handful or two of mushy leaves. I am letting it all dry out so I can remove all the dirt. Not finding many roots - surprise, surprise!

So now I'll be trimming back to find healthy tissue and start some of the little plants (new branches?) that seem to be OK so far. Hopefully all is not lost!

For those out there who do not think the soil mix is important, here's proof that it certainly IS. (And I cannot believe that I let it get this far without noticing that it was getting all that water.)

Well, this stuff happens. These root easily for me, and they do grow like mad, so they'll rebuild themselves into new plants in no time.

Sorry about your beautiful plant ;-(

teatree - thank you for the encouragement. I do seem to have enough viable pieces to work with. And new DRY soil mix (gritty) will help! I'm glad to hear that they root easily for you.

laura1 - I know you can understand the summer weather. It comes in buckets. We have a metal roof, so the rain flies off of it and overshoots the gutters a lot of times. Here I thought I had them all safe on the lanai. We're on a lake, so there is nothing to stop the wind from blowing the rain in, either.

In the back of my mind, I knew I needed to repot and get this plant into better draining soil. Shame on me for not getting this done sooner!

Hopefully, I will have plenty of new plants to show off in a few months!

Crenda,

Sorry to hear about your plant there..

I live just a little north of you in central fl... how many days of the heavy rain we were getting did it take to cause the root rot to start? I use the same mix ( although i do mix in about 50% perlite and small river pebbles). I'm really trying to get a feel of "how much" rain is too much.

I am in the process of building a rain shelter...kind of like laura1's.. but until then .. i am laboring moving the collecting in and out of the patio, and i'm so paranoid that i do it almost every day now with our summer rain.

I'm convinced that Miracle Gro is demon soil. I've had nothing but death using that craptastic mix. I even did a 50/50 mix with perlite and the soil was still soggy and mushy a few days after watering. Never again will I buy their soil mixes.

Your plant should recover though in no time with a better soil medium. Always a disappointment when it happens though :/

I've had no issues with it yet. ( after 4 or 5 months ) , but I am in Florida, so the sun dries the soil pretty quickly here and I do mix in about 50% Perlite and some pebbles as mentioned above. Maybe the pebbles are helping more than I thought..

We got 3 1/2 inches on the 30th, then 1 1/2, an inch, and inch, 1/4 inch, 3/4 inch, followed by 2 days of intermittent sprinkles. The soil never really got the chance to dry out. And my not adding anything like perlite to help the drainage really doomed the poor thing.

I'm in Cape Coral - across the river from Fort Myers. Local code won't let me built a rain shelter. Heck, we couldn't even put in posts to hang orchids on. (And I have one of those neighbors who would report me!) All of these things can become missiles in a hurricane - never mind that I would secure or take them down when I knew a storm was coming!

We have a pretty big overhang that I thought would protect the plants. But I didn't notice that an L-shaped area threw the water on the end of the bench. The plants in a gritty mix did fine as did those with at least 50% perlite.

Me too...I am sorry about your plant. It happens to most of us but thank goodness we can take cuttings so that they can carry on the lineage,,,,It will come back again.

Good luck

Mike