The edges of your lawn speak volume about your home’s landscape. If the grass is overgrown, or if it’s filled with weeds, it will look messy and unkempt. With a little work, however, you can tidy up the edges of your lawn.

Control Loose Soil

First, make sure the edges are well-defined, without any excess soil covering your lawn’s adjacent sidewalk or driveway. Even small amounts of soil will create a new area in which weeds can thrive.

Therefore, you should control loose soil to ensure your lawn’s edges are well-defined. If you discover soil on the adjacent driveway or sidewalk, use a garden hose or pressure washer – on the lowest pressure setting – to remove it.

Mow Before Edging

Most professional landscapers recommend mowing your lawn before edging it. This makes sense considering that mowing will remove a substantial amount of grass – grass that you’d otherwise need to remove by edging.

So, set your mower blade to a height of about 2 or 3 inches and mow your lawn before edging. Once mowed, you can pull out the string trimmer to clean it up.

Use 180-Degree Angle With Trimmer

After mowing your lawn, you can proceed to clean up the edges with a string trimmer. Rather than holding it parallel to the surface of the soil, however, hold it so the head is positioned at a 180-degree angle.

This will allow you to “dig” the head across your lawn’s edge, thereby removing grass and weeds that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach.

Don’t Go Too Far Back

The secret to creating clean, well-defined edges on a lawn is not to go too far back when using a string trimmer. In other words, you should keep the trimmer directly on the edge of your lawn.

Moving it too far back on the grass will make it uneven. To prevent this from happening, keep your trimmer aligned with your lawn’s edges at all time.

Consider Lawn Edging

Of course, you can reduce or even eliminate the need to edge your lawn by using lawn edging. Basically, lawn edging is material used to block the edge of a lawn. There’s special lawn edging products available at most gardening stores.

Typically made of aluminum or steel, they consist of thin plates that are embedded into the soil at the edge of a lawn. Alternatively, you can make your own lawn edging using brick or concrete pavers.

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