Stroll through any garden center and you are soon going to be dazzled by the multitudes of lawn edging materials — their sizes, styles and costs. All lawn edging performs three primary purposes: They neaten the edge between lawn and garden bed, provide a barrier against invading grass and grass roots, and hold mulch in the bed. You would like your lawn competition to be appealing, but it shouldn’t steal the show from your colorful flowers or flowers in the garden. Pick your edging sensibly, and you’ll enjoy a neater and more attractive garden with less maintenance.
Evaluate your garden design. Determine whether it is formal, glowing, rigidly geometric or casually comfortable. Pick a lawn edging which enhances the design. Furthermore, think about the different designs where the edging is installed. As an instance, a low-lying, mortarless stone or brick edging evokes a rustic or timeless look, but the very same stones or stones neatly stacked in mortar add a formality to the garden.
Think about your budget. Paving stones, iron picket-fence edging and other manufactured products look beautiful but come at a high price. Your garden may look just as beautiful with a less costly fake material like a vinyl lookalike or natural stones collected from the yard. Aircraft materials function well, too. Consider old bricks or ceramic flooring tiles salvaged from an old home or renovation project. These would need to be set in a trench filled with a thick layer of pea gravel or inside a thick bed of concrete to keep weeds at bay.
Start looking for quality products which will endure your local climate. If your garden is pummeled by ocean spray, the incisions in the spray may pit some metal, concrete or stone edging over time. Wood edging is vulnerable to decay in boggy, shady and moist areas, so vinyl is a good alternative. Most stone — especially local stone — looks very appealing and endures nearly all climates, but it can be costly to buy, arrange and transport. Furthermore, avoid chemically treated wood edging for gardens with plants that are edible. These toxins seep into the soil and can contaminate your vegetable or herb gardens.
Write down the benefits and disadvantages of the most common lawn edging kind. The most fundamental and readily installed lawn edging is that the black plastic landscape edging. This product is readily pounded with a rubber mallet to the lawn along the bed’s edge. The flexible material readily bends around the borders of the beds and prevents grass roots from infiltrating the bed. The material is fairly unsightly, however, and might crack or split under the warm sun or foot traffic.
Weigh your other lawn edging solutions, and think about installing black plastic landscape edging with the other, more decorative product. Wood edging is a flexible and affordable product but needs replacing every decade or so. Vinyl is a good substitute for wood, and some substances even mimic wood grain, however affordable white vinyl turns yellow in the sun and cracks or warps in extreme heat and cold. Concrete and bricks last very long and can be adapted to suit any garden style but are far more expensive and more laborious to set up. Metal — especially rust-inhibiting aluminum — is one of the most durable substances but can also be one of the most expensive goods. Metal edging may lead to serious damage to lawn gear if not installed properly.
Consider how much care your edging will need. Narrow edging may require more maintenance, and you might end up trimming the bed’s edge more frequently. To stop grass roots and grass seeds in infesting your beds, then the best lawn competition creates a barrier 6 inches deep and 6 inches wide and can be set a few inches over the lawn’s surface. Such thick edging requires a great amount of work to set up but greatly reduces future maintenance.
Measure your garden bed edge and add at least 10 percent to the total. The additional length allows for minor bends, shifts or turns in the edge which often increase the measurement. Measuring will help you figure out the full cost of your desired edging.