Before the Season: The May Checklist
The heavy work belongs in late spring, when contractors have availability and nothing is on the map.
- Thin dense canopies. Wind pressure on a tree scales with the sail area it presents. Selective thinning of small trees and large shrubs lets wind pass through instead of pushing — this is trimming-crew work for reachable material, arborist work for the big oaks and pines. What you are looking for: dead wood, crossing branches, and limbs overhanging the roof.
- Clean up the palms — correctly. Remove dead fronds and seed stalks, which genuinely do become projectiles. Do not strip green fronds into a "hurricane cut"; over-pruned palms are weaker in wind, not stronger, as covered in the palm care page.
- Verify drainage before you need it. Walk the yard in the next heavy rain: where does water pond, where do downspouts discharge, does the grade push water at the slab? Storms drop rain in feet-per-day quantities here — fix the drainage weak points while the ground is dry enough to trench.
- Audit what lives loose in the yard. Planters, furniture, umbrellas, trampolines, grills. You will not have time to think about all of it at watch stage — know now what gets moved where.
- Photograph the property. Five minutes of walking video of yard, trees, fence, and roofline, stored in the cloud, makes any later insurance conversation vastly easier.
Watch and Warning: The Last 48 Hours
- Move the loose inventory into the garage or shed — the list you made in May. Anything that cannot come in gets grouped and tied low against a solid wall, not the fence.
- Do not prune now. Cut limbs and piled brush that cannot be hauled before landfall are ammunition lying in the yard. If it cannot leave the property before the storm, leave it on the tree.
- Clear inlets and gutters — drains, catch-basin grates, and gutter downspouts blocked by pine straw defeat every drainage dollar you spent.
- Shut irrigation off. The lawn is about to receive a year's watering in a day; a controller running its 4 a.m. cycle mid-storm helps nothing.
After: The First 48 Hours
Safety sequencing matters more than speed. Before touching any debris, look up and around: sagging lines, leaning trees, limbs hung in canopies ("widow-makers") waiting for a tug on the brush below them. Anything involving a power line is the utility's job — full stop. Anything large on a structure is a tree service and insurance conversation before it is a cleanup. What a landscaping crew handles is everything else, and there is a lot of it: fronds, limbs, leaf mats plastered over lawns and drains, fence-line debris, and the cutting, stacking, and hauling that follows — the core of storm cleanup service. Book early; after a named storm the whole metro calls at once, and the queue is honest but real.
Lawn triage after flooding: get leaf and debris mats off the grass within a few days — matted debris smothers turf that survived the storm itself. Silt-covered grass usually recovers once rinsed; salt-flooded lawns near the bays are a wait-and-see, and sections that stay dead become fall sod patches.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should storm-prep trimming be done?
Late winter through May, ideally. It avoids the June rush, gives trees time to seal cuts, and — critically — means no cut debris is sitting in the yard when the first system spins up in the Gulf.
Should palms get a hurricane cut before a storm?
No. Stripping green fronds weakens palms and does not reduce storm risk — healthy canopies shed wind better. Remove only dead fronds and seed stalks. Any crew insisting on skinning your palms "for the storm" is selling you damage.
Who removes a tree that fell on my fence or roof?
A tree removal service — and for structures, call your insurer first, since documentation affects the claim. Landscaping crews take over afterward: the scattered debris, the lawn recovery, and hauling what the tree crew cut.
How fast can a cleanup crew come after a storm?
For ordinary yard debris, typically within days — earlier if you are on a crew’s existing route, which is one more argument for recurring service. Property-wide disasters obviously stretch every timeline in the county.