If you've lived in North Texas more than a year, you know the deal. One week it's 82 and sunny, the next week there's golf-ball hail, a tornado watch, and three inches of rain in an hour. Spring is beautiful here and it's also completely unhinged. And your yard is out there taking all of it.
The National Weather Service Fort Worth office has been putting out more severe weather bulletins this April than usual, and we've already seen a handful of storms roll through the metroplex. Here's what we tell clients to keep an eye on once the weather gets wild.
After Hail: Check Your Turf and Your Tender Plants
Hail bruises grass blades and shreds the leaves on anything soft — hostas, new annuals, tomatoes if you've got a vegetable bed. The lawn will bounce back on its own, but badly hit ornamentals sometimes need the damaged growth trimmed off so the plant redirects energy instead of trying to repair dead leaves. If you had a serious hail event and your lawn looks stripped, give it two weeks before panicking. It almost always recovers.
After Heavy Rain: Watch for Standing Water and Fungus
DFW clay soil doesn't drain fast. When we get two or three inches in a short window, water pools — and if it pools in the same low spot every time, you've got a drainage problem that's slowly killing the grass there. The fix is usually a french drain, a regrade, or a shallow swale depending on the situation. Texas A&M AgriLife has good resources on residential drainage if you want to read up.
The other thing heavy rain brings is brown patch and large patch fungus — circular dead-looking spots that appear after warm, wet stretches. If you see perfect circles of brown in your St. Augustine or Bermuda after a storm, that's usually fungal, not drought. It's treatable, but it needs the right product at the right time.
After High Winds: Walk Your Trees
This is the one most homeowners skip and regret. After any serious wind event — and we've had a few already — walk your property and look up. You're looking for:
Cracked or split branches that didn't fall but are hanging on by fiber. These become missiles in the next storm.
Leaning trees with soil heaving at the base. That's a root failure in progress. It won't fix itself.
Torn bark or wounds on the trunk. These invite borers and disease — especially on oaks, where oak wilt is a real threat if you prune or wound an oak during the wrong season (April through June is the high-risk window, so be careful).
Temperature Whiplash: Your Beds Feel It More Than Your Lawn
North Texas spring swings from a hard freeze warning one week to 85 degrees the next. Established turf handles it fine. What gets hurt is:
Newly planted annuals that got in the ground during a warm stretch and then got hammered by a late freeze. If you lost a bed of petunias, it wasn't your fault — it was April.
Citrus and tropicals in containers on the patio. Move them under cover when a freeze is forecast. We know the forecast is unreliable. Move them anyway.
Bluebonnets and early perennials that started blooming too soon. Cover them with a sheet (not plastic) if a freeze is coming and they'll usually make it.
After Lightning: Check the Irrigation Controller
This one surprises people. A nearby lightning strike can scramble your irrigation controller's programming or fry it entirely. If your sprinklers start behaving weirdly after a storm — running at wrong times, skipping zones, stuck on one cycle — that's probably why. Sometimes a reset fixes it. Sometimes you need a new controller.
What to Do With All This
Honestly? If you want to walk your own property after every storm and keep up with it, you absolutely can. Most of this is just paying attention.
But if it's starting to feel like another full-time job — that's what we're here for. We do post-storm walkthroughs, drainage assessments, fungus treatment, tree limb removal, and full property cleanups across Carrollton, Dallas, Frisco, Lewisville, Plano, Coppell, and the rest of DFW. After a bad storm, we usually get slammed — so reach out early if something looks off.
