How to Protect Plants From a Typhoon in the Philippines

If you have gardened in the Philippines for more than one rainy season, you know the routine. A low pressure area shows up on the forecast, then a storm signal, and suddenly you are staring at your plants wondering which ones to save first. Knowing how to protect plants from a typhoon is less about buying equipment and more about timing. Most of the damage I see afterward comes from small things people could have finished in about an hour, the day before the wind arrived.

Here is the order I work in when a storm is a day or two out.

1. Move and group your pots against a solid wall

Wind does the most damage to pots that are alone and top heavy. Tall plastic pots are the first to go flying, and a falling pot usually snaps the stem instead of just spilling soil.

Carry everything you can indoors, into a covered garage, or under a stairwell. Whatever is left outside, push into a tight cluster against a wall on the side away from the wind, with the tallest plants in the middle and the heavier clay pots on the outside. Plants that are packed together shelter each other. If you garden on a condo balcony, take everything off the railing first. A 6 inch pot dropped from the ninth floor is not a gardening problem anymore.

For pots too heavy to lift, lay them on their side against the wall. It looks strange, but a pot on its side does not topple.

2. Stake and tie anything taller than your knee

Tomatoes, eggplant, okra, papaya seedlings, and young calamansi all snap at the same place: about a hand span above the soil line. A single bamboo stake driven deep, with two ties instead of one, prevents almost all of it.

Tie in a loose figure eight so the stem can still flex. A tight loop will saw through the stem when the plant whips back and forth for six hours. Soft ties beat wire every time, which is why I keep a roll of coco rope in the toolbox, and reusable plant clips for vines like bitter gourd and winged bean that need to be secured to a trellis fast.

Trellises need attention too. If yours is only pushed into soft soil, it will lift out with the whole vine attached. Lash it to a fence, a post, or a downspout.

3. Prune before the wind does it for you

A leafy canopy acts like a sail. Thinning it out by roughly a quarter gives the wind somewhere to pass through instead of pushing the whole plant over.

Take off anything already dead, broken, or crossing. Shorten long unbranched shoots on gumamela and bougainvillea. On banana and papaya, remove the lowest yellowing leaves so they do not tear and rip the trunk on the way down. Use a clean cut with sharp pruning shears rather than tearing by hand, because ragged wounds are exactly where rot starts once everything is soaked.

One caution: do not do a heavy prune on a plant that is already flowering or fruiting unless the branch is genuinely a hazard. You will lose the harvest for nothing.

4. Fix your drainage now, not during the downpour

More plants die in the week after a typhoon than during it, and the usual cause is roots sitting in water. A pot that drains fine in a normal shower will not cope with 200 millimeters in a day.

Check that every drainage hole is actually open. Roots, compacted soil, and a stray leaf will block them. Lift pots off flat concrete using bricks, bottle caps, or pot feet so water can escape from underneath, and empty any saucers before the rain starts. For ground beds, open a shallow channel so runoff has somewhere to go instead of pooling around the stems.

If you are repotting anyway, this is a good moment to loosen a heavy mix with horticultural perlite. A layer of red lava rocks on top also keeps hard rain from splashing soil out and exposing the roots.

5. Harvest anything close to ready

Pick it slightly early rather than lose it completely. Tomatoes at the first blush of color will ripen on the kitchen counter in three to five days. Take the outer leaves off your lettuce and bok choy, cut water spinach (kangkong) back to about four inches, and pull any bulb onions that have started to fall over.

Fruit left hanging on a whipping branch usually ends up bruised on the ground anyway, and it adds weight that helps snap the branch. Clearing it is genuinely a favor to the plant.

6. What to do in the first 48 hours after the storm

Resist the urge to fix everything at once. Work in this order:

• Stand the pots up and drain them. Tip out standing water, clear silt off the soil surface, and move waterlogged pots somewhere they can dry.
• Rinse the leaves. If you are near the coast, salt spray travels far inland and burns foliage within a couple of days. Plain water from a hose is enough.
• Cut cleanly. Trim torn branches back to a clean edge so they can seal over.
• Watch for fungal problems. Warm air plus soaked leaves means leaf spot and blight show up within a week. Yellow patches with dark edges are the early warning. A protective spray such as Dithane fungicide is most useful applied before the problem spreads, not after.
• Wait on fertilizer. Give roots about a week to recover. Then feed lightly. A foliar spray like the leaf development plant sprayer or a soil drench with humic acid helps damaged roots take up nutrients again without burning them.

The one hour version

If a storm is coming tonight and you only have an hour, do these five things:

1. Bring in every small pot and clear the balcony railing.
2. Group the rest against a wall, tallest in the middle.
3. Stake and double tie anything taller than your knee.
4. Unblock drainage holes and empty the saucers.
5. Harvest what is nearly ready.

That covers most of what actually goes wrong. Everything else is a bonus.

Gardens here are tougher than they look. I have seen calamansi stripped bare in September push out new leaves by November. The plants you lose are usually the ones that were already stressed, and the ones you save are usually the ones you spent twenty minutes on the day before.

What is your go to trick when a storm is on the way? Tell us in the comments, especially if you garden on a high floor or somewhere the wind really funnels through. Someone reading this is about to need it.