👋🏼Hi there!
If you're looking to tidy up your garden bed, organize your outdoor space, keep mulch or gravel from spilling onto your walkways, or boost your property's curb appeal?
Welcome! You're in the right place.
And you're doing the right thing!
The Benefits of Landscape Edging
Amend and Build Up Soil
Edging around your planting beds (flower beds, vegetable garden, landscape beds) enables you to increase soil level by adding soil, compost, and/or mulch nd keeping it on the planting bed.
(Note: you'll want to use mulch made with organic material to amend soil - i.e., wood chips, not natural stone.)
Keep Garden Beds Moist and Water Use Low
Adding a top layer of mulch to your beds will help to keep the soil below from drying out quickly so you use less water in the garden. Edging let's you top up your soil with an optimal amount of moisture-saving mulch.
Keep Things Contained
If you use mulch, gravel, decorative stone, river rocks, or the like in your landscape design landscape edging will keep it where you want it, maximizing the visual impact and utility of these elements.
Add Definition To Your Garden and Landscape
Edging is a key component of landscape and garden design. Use it to:
- create garden spaces, landscape beds, and lawn edges;
- direct foot traffic by showing visitors where and where not to walk;
- guide the eye to focal points - featured plants, objects, and areas
- define spaces and organize your outdoor area into manageable beds.
So Many Options... Which is right for you?
There are many different types of edging to choose from, limited only by the shape of your gardens, desired landscape design, and personal taste.
Here are some common edging materials and products that are easy to get at home improvement stores such as Home Depot, Lowes, Menards as well as local hardware stores and garden centers.
- Plastic edging and plastic lawn edging.
- Pound-in metal edging (steel edging, aluminum edging).
- Rustic wood edging (landscape timbers, railroad ties).
- Dimensional lumber (pressure treated, cedar, redwood, etc.).
- Concrete garden edging (curbing) and precast concrete pavers.
- Brick pavers and regular bricks.
Depending on the landscape you'll install in, and personal preferences, you'll have your own good reasons to choose one type of edging over another.
If you're new to landscape edging, one consideration you might not know about is the installation method - in particular, the level of effort it can take to install edging.
Ahem, keep reading....
Installing Landscape Edging the Hard Way
If you like losing an entire weekend to doing back breaking work in your yard, you've got many choices when it comes to landscape edging.
And when I say back breaking work, I mean it.
Concrete
Want to create DIY concrete curbing? Get ready to drag 50 pound bags of dry concrete mix to your work area.
And that 50 pounds of concrete? Continues to beat you up as you pick it up and pour it into a 5-gallon bucket, stir in the🤞🏼correct amount of water, and mix to the correct consistency.
Finally, you get to pick up that heavy bucket of wet cement and - oh, I forgot to mention you need to build a form to pour the cement into!
All to say? Making cement curbing is a lot of back breaking work.
Pavers & Bricks
Thinking about using bricks or pavers? You'll need to grab your string line, grab a flat spade, and dig a trench.
Digging even a shallow trench can be back breaking work (think digging up grass roots, dealing with tree roots, breaking through hard-packed earth....).
Next - fun! - lug heavy bags of gravel or sand over to your work area, spread the sand in the trench to create a level and solid gravel or sand base to place your bricks and pavers on.
Plastic
You'll also need to dig a trench to install plastic landscape edging.
Grab your round point shovel .You'll need to dig a narrow, deep trench that you can place your plastic edging into, keeping it upright and hopefully holding its shape while you back fill the trench with loose soil that you'll pack down.
Large Format Lumber
Here I'm talking about 4x4, 4x6, 6x6 dimensional lumber as well as rustic lumber options such as timber edging and railroad ties.
Because of the size of this type of lumber, you'll need to even the ground before laying down the lumber.
This will likely mean digging a trench to level the ground and create a solid base to receive the lumber.
You may also need to lug over bags of gravel or sand to get things laid out evenly, depends on your terrain.
About Railroad Ties
Thinking about using railroad ties? According to Home Depot's specs an 8-foot railroad tie weighs 200 pounds.
I repeat: two hundred pounds.
Railroad ties are heavy. They're also full of creosote, a preservative that you may not want in your garden.
So yeah, you can do it the hard way.
Or you can do it the easy way.
Installing Landscape Edging the Easy Way
If you'd like to skip the digging and leveling and lugging around heavy bags of sand, gravel, cement or large unwieldy pieces of lumber - you can.
With 2xEDGE Staples and the two-by (2x) lumber of your choice, installing landscape edging can be done with just one tool - a rubber mallet - and tackled in three simple steps:
- Cut the lumber to size.
- Place it on the ground.
- Tap in your staples.
That's it!
See? 👁️ It's Easy!🎥
Check out this short video that shows how I created a garden bed along the side of my she-shed in prep to do a mass fern planting.
Project Length
The entire project took about 2.5 hours. However, the actual landscape edging installation took a mere few minutes. Here's a breakdown of the steps:
60 mins: Buying lumber & mulch
30 mins: Staining two 10-foot 2x4s
15 mins: Measuring & cutting 2x4s
10 mins: Placing lumber, installing staples
20 mins: Spreading mulch
Materials
Lumber
I used pressure treated 2x4 lumber to create my edging because I wanted a tall border to contain much needed soil building organic mulch.
Wood stain
I used the same dark oil-based stain meant for exterior decks that I used to coat the small deck next to the shed to create a cohesive look.
Staples
I chose Robins Egg Blue 2xEDGE Staples because the brilliant, saturated blue offers a lot of contrast against the dark stained wood.
Tools
16 ounce rubber mallet - required. Using a regular hammer to install the staples will dent and deform them.
Compound miter saw. Making angled cuts is quick and easy with this saw, but you can use a circular saw or manual saw just as effectively.
Tape measure
Just noting that this list of tools doesn't include shovels, or drills, or screwdrivers because you won't need to dig a trench and you won't put holes in your wood - which weakens it and shortens it's useful life - to screw it together or to stakes.
So, Now You Know👍🏼
No, you don’t have to spend a weekend - or more! - working with heavy edging materials to create flower beds or garden borders.
Hopefully, one thing you get from the companion video available above is how easy and relaxed a landscape edging installation can be.
Two-by lumber is an excellent choice for making high-quality edging with a distinct clean edge. It's great because you can customize it to suit your vision - stain it, paint it, or leave it alone and let it weather naturally in your landscape.
Use two-by lumber and 2xEDGE to easily make square and rectangular beds. Or make more complicated shapes - hexagons, parallelograms, octagons - with simple angled cuts.
With the variety of 2xEDGE Staple colors now available you’ll make super unique edging that will last for years. Plus - enjoy pops of color in your landscape all winter long that will coalesce with nature’s pops of color as they erupt in Spring.
Enjoy the show!
Photo Credit📸
Photos included in this article were taken by 2xEDGE and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
Related Links You Might Like🎁
How To Make a Mulch Bed in Your Garden (Easy DIY Guide)
Best Wood For Landscape Edging? Two-by (2x) Lumber
You've Got Options! Choosing the Lumber That's Right For Your Project