Preparing for Irene

[MammaG]

I'm a very novice gardener and similarly novice at hurricanes, living in New England.  A few questions:

I harvested all the ripe-ish tomatoes, all the squash and a lot of chard.  Do I need to cut down my herbs and just dry them now?  We have a crabapple tree and have been shaking that all day to get as many down now as possible (we'll spend the storm making crabapple jelly, it seems).  Can I somehow help my tomato plants and my just-growing eggplant plant make it through?

We're going to cut our big, beautiful sunflowers this afternoon before it rains and put them in a vase....I assume those big 7-foot guys wouldn't survive, right?

Any other tips?

[Lovesong]

Probably too late by now, but...

There really is pretty little one can do about ones garden when a hurricane comes knocking. I think you've pretty much done what you can do, in harvesting what can be harvested and cutting down your sunflowers so you can enjoy them.

When it comes to your herbs, is it the kind that have stalks prone to breaking off from too hard rain then harvest and dry. If it is more of a "grassy" sort, they make look a bit battered, but generally survive just fine once you coax them to stand up again.

As for your young plants, I can't think of anything you may do except perhaps cup up some extra earth around them to protect the stems if they are really young. Any kind of supportive structure may be torn away by the wind, and harm the plants. Same goes for fabric covers.

Other than that...

Do make sure there are no loose objects out in your garden, be it chairs or garden trowels, potted plants or wheelbarrows.

Remove any glass ornaments you may have (broken glass is a pain to clean up even on a concrete floor indoors, even worse in grass).

Do look over any plant support you may have. Make sure they are properly hammered down into the earth. Not that it guarantees that they will stay in place, but at least, there's less chance of them coming loose and as a consequence breaking the plants attached to them.

Make sure all doors and windows of all kinds are properly latched in place.

Then, hope the hurricane will not be too rough on your garden.

Best of wishes, and hoping your garden will survive without being too battered.