Large storms like hurricanes or thunderstorms bring with them torrential rains, strong winds, hail and lightning. These harsh elements can wreak havoc on anything outside—including cars, buildings or patio furniture—but they can be particularly damaging to your plants. You work hard to keep your yard and garden growing healthily and beautifully, but flooding, winds and lightning can cause such severe damage that you might not know where to start.
If you need help repairing your garden or trees after a storm, here are some tips that you can try before calling a professional for tree maintenance. The most important part about saving your garden is removing dead or damaged pieces to make room for new growth. Follow these steps to help your garden recover.
Clean up debris
The first thing you’ll want to do after a storm is head out to your yard and start cleaning up any debris that is cluttering your garden space. Remove dead tree branches, leaves, broken twigs and flower stems, as well as any non-living debris that might have been blown into your yard.
Assess the damage
Once your yard is clear, you can start to assess the damage that may be hidden beneath the mess. Your garden may be completely salvageable, with only minimal work to do, or it may be completely destroyed.
Check your trees to see if there are any broken branches hanging from them or if there is major damage to the trunks. You may need to call for tree maintenance to have a professional trim, prune or remove damaged branches, or remove trees entirely if they’re too damaged to keep.
For your other plants, check the branches and flowers and trim or remove areas as necessary. If your garden has been flooded, check to see if you have plants that can only survive with a certain amount of water. Remove those plants and re-pot them in a plastic or ceramic pot using dry soil with a small amount of the flooded soil. Hopefully, they will survive and you can replant them once your soil dries out a little bit.
Replace soil
Storms can easily wash soil away, leaving plants with exposed roots and very few nutrients. Assess the level of soil remaining in your garden and add new soil in areas where it is low. We recommend bagged potting soil for the best level of moisture. You can also hose soil off of sidewalks and driveways back into your garden to clean up your yard, and replace it as needed.
Replant
Once everything looks back to normal, you can replant your potted plants and add new plants if you had to remove some extremely damaged ones. This is also a good time to redesign your garden or implement features that can help prevent storm damage in the future, such as retaining walls to contain soil.
If your garden has been damaged, call Allan’s Tree Service for all of your tree care needs. For 15 years, we’ve been your local experts in full-service tree care, including planting, removal and tree maintenance. We want to help your trees grow healthily. Call us today for a free estimate!
Categorised in: Tree Maintenance
This post was written by Allan's