Edging Your Perennial Garden

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Sott Reil and on behalf of expertvillage.com, I would like to talk to you about perennial gardens. Edging the perennial bed is the only way I know to keep the lawn and the perennial bed separate. There are a couple of ways to go about it. We will talk just about a few here. First way to take care of it is the old fashioned way, with the shovel and a good hand cut edge is a good way to edge your bed. Just make sure you pack that edge really deeply, make sure you cut down at least a good 3 inches so you are going all the way through the roots of grass there, make sure you haul all that grass and stuff back out of there and rake it out so that it doesn't incorporate and become part of your garden soil and just sprout up grass inside anyway. Packing that edge with mulch works great. But that is a lot of work year after year. For me, it was a lot easier to do it once, go back in and install an edging. In this case, I've chosen Belgium Block. I did it for a couple of reasons. One, I don't like the way that black plastic stuff works. One, it tends to frost heat up out of the ground here where we have our regular freeze frost cycle and ends up sticking a couple of inches out of the ground every time even if you've got the stakes on it and two, it's not UV resistant so it ends up cracking up and breaking and getting old looking and frankly, the garden is about looking pretty not old and broken and cracked. The stone of the Belgium Block gives me a nice finished professional garden look that lets me put a string edge up here on the garden. It helps keep my grass in this side, it helps keep my mulch in on this side. So when you are putting your perennial bed in, consider the expense, consider the time whether or not you have it to make your hand edge and most of all consider the ecstatic, consider what you are going for. I think you will agree spend a little money to put a nice edge in there is well worth it. "