Deep edging is an easy but labour-intensive landscape task. It gives our planted beds a nice definition and, if you read this blog regularly, you will know how to do it.
Deep edging 101
- Grab an edging shovel and drive it into your bed edge at ninety degrees. This will give you a nice sharp edge.
- The depth depends on conditions and your needs. Personally, I love deep, ankle-busting edges but it makes me extremely unpopular at work.
- If your edging generates grassy chunks, shake off the soil and discard the grass.
- The last step is cleaning up the chunks with a rake or cultivator so the bed surface is nice and smooth without visible chunks.
One exception
There are exceptions in life and in landscaping. I’m repeating myself a little bit but only because I ran into this one deep edging exception last week.
Pro tip: Training never really ends. Pay attention to all new workers.
Everything ran smoothly for hours until we hit a nicely mulched bed. This is where we have to disconnect the autopilot. The edging chunks landed on top of the mulch and now this blog post is called a deep edging faux pas.
It’s a mistake because the chunks mess up the nice, ordered look of the mulched bed. Instead, we have to do one of two things.
- Deep edge the bed but do not kick the soil up. Just leave it dislodged so we can manually remove it without messing up the bark mulch.
- Or you can rake the bark mulch away from the edge, deep edge, remove any excess soil and, lastly, rake the bark mulch back into its original place.
In this particular case, we didn’t do any major harm. I picked up the chunks and cultivated the bark mulch to incorporate any soil into the mulch. And the client will never know.
Conclusion
Deep-edging is an easy landscape task but be careful when you deep edge freshly mulched beds. You have to take a few extra steps to deep edge these areas.
