If freshly mowed lawn is the cake and having a nice edge on that lawn is kind of like the frosting. Right now, I’m going to show you some tips and some techniques in creating a nice edge for your lawn.
Now the first thing you’ve got to do is select which tool you want to use. Now they all get the job done. I’ve got some tools here and I’m going to show you how they work starting with the manual stick edge. Now if you want to go green and you want to get a workout, get yourself a nice mechanical edger. It’s got a wheel, it’s got this tines attached to the wheel. And when the wheel spins, the tines go through and they’ll cut and give you a nice little edge there. It does take a little bit of work. The faster you push this, the better edge it will give you.
Now, we’ve got the walk behind edger. Now this is a great tool especially if you’ve got a long area you need to edge, but the blade is limited to one side. You’ve got a lot going on with this piece of equipment also because; one, it’s a power tool. We’ve got levers here so that we can set that blade higher or lower. And of course on this side, we can give our lawn a beveled edge by just adjusting this, but I’m going to go straight.
As for edging technique, the goal is to get a nice clean vertical line that reaches from the tallest blade of grass down to about an inch below the concrete. You won’t get it perfect on a single pass so it helps to make a few passes until you get a nice clean look. Finally, try and avoid contacting the concrete with the blade and watch out for sprinkle heads and hidden pipes. Now that is a nice edge.
But I’ve got one even better for you, the string trimmer. This one piece of power equipment has replaced so many other. It’s a trimmer, it’s an edger and we’ve got no blade here. We’ve just got a nylon string here which is going to spin at a speed that’s so fast that they turn into a blade. Now the reason I call it a trimmer and an edger is because the first thing you want to do before you actually start putting your edge around the lawn, the perimeter there, you first want to take it and you want to trim around your tree being careful. Make sure you don’t hit the bark on the tree. One thing that a lot of people mess up and do and then you have a dead tree. And my favorite style of edging is to create a beveled edge.
To create the bevel, I slam the trimmer back toward me keeping it turned over so the guard protects me from flying debris. Now it does take some practice, just like any other power equipment. The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. The good thing is that the grass is going to keep on growing back and you get to keep on trying that again.
All I have to do now is blow the grass back onto there and then I can mow my lawn. That’s the benefit of edging first. You can blow it onto the grass and just suck up everything with a lawn mower.
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