How to edge a lawn

Video by The Lawn Man. This guide is based on the video “LAWN EDGING guide | Alan shows how to edge lawns like a pro” from The Lawn Man, a UK lawn care channel with clear, no-nonsense technique. The section on re-cutting neglected edges that have grown out over the bed is particularly useful if your lawn borders have not been touched in a season or two.

1. Understand the difference between edging and trimming

These two jobs get confused quite often. Trimming (with a strimmer or edging shears) is about cutting grass that has grown over an existing edge — tidying the top and sides of an edge that already exists. Edging, properly speaking, is cutting back into the lawn to re-establish or redefine a clean vertical boundary between the grass and the border or path.

You only need to re-edge properly once or twice a year, typically in spring when growth picks up and in late summer before the lawn slows down. Between those sessions, a pair of long-handled edging shears after each mow is enough to keep things looking sharp. Getting those two jobs clear in your head means you are not doing more work than is actually needed.

2. Mark out a straight or curved line before you cut

For straight edges along a path or patio, lay a plank or a taut string line along the desired border. The plank is the easier option — you can stand on it to keep it in place and run the half-moon edger along its side for a perfectly straight cut. For curved borders, a garden hose laid out and adjusted until the curve looks right gives you a guide to follow. Step back and look at it from a distance before you start cutting; curves that look fine up close can look lopsided from across the garden.

It depends on what you are edging against. On a lawn that backs up to a path or patio, the hard surface sets the line for you. On a free-form border with no hard edge, that initial guide line is everything — a bad line cut in now will be the shape you are maintaining for the next year or two.

3. Use a half-moon edger to cut the new edge

A half-moon edger (sometimes called a lawn edging iron) is the right tool for re-cutting a proper edge. It has a flat, semicircular blade you push down through the turf with your foot, cutting a clean vertical face into the soil. Work along the line in overlapping plunges, moving the tool forward a few centimetres each time so the cuts join up into a continuous line. Keep it upright — tilting it produces a slanted face that looks untidy and lets grass roots re-establish more easily.

A spade can do a reasonable job as a substitute, but the straight blade makes it harder to follow a curve and the cuts tend to be less clean. If you are going to edge regularly, a dedicated half-moon edger is genuinely worth having. They are not expensive — a decent stainless one from a garden centre costs about the same as a large bag of compost.

4. Remove the spoil from the edge

Once you have cut along the full length of the edge, there will be a strip of turf and soil sitting in the bottom of the cut that needs lifting out. A border fork or a narrow spade works well for this. Rake the loose material off the lawn and either add it to the compost bin or use it to fill any bare patches elsewhere in the garden. Do not leave it sitting on the lawn — it smothers the grass underneath within a few days and creates more work later.

What you are left with should be a clean, shallow channel running along the border. This channel is actually useful: it stops grass roots from creeping straight back into the bed and it creates a small sump that rainwater drains into rather than running across the lawn. In a Kent garden where the soil can be fairly heavy clay, that small bit of drainage helps.

5. Trim the grass face with long-handled shears

After re-cutting, the vertical face of the edge needs tidying. Long-handled edging shears let you stand upright and cut the grass growing over the edge without bending double. Hold the blades parallel with the ground and work along the edge in short snips, following the line you have just cut. This is the step that makes the edge look genuinely crisp rather than just roughly defined.

A cordless lawn edger does the same job faster if you have a long run of edges or your back does not thank you for prolonged bending. To be fair, shears give a slightly cleaner result on curves and corners, so for a small town garden they are probably enough. If you are maintaining a larger plot around one of the older houses out near Worth or Eastry, a battery-powered tool starts to make more sense.

6. Maintain the edge through the growing season

A newly cut edge will start to lose definition within a few weeks during the main growing season. Run the edging shears along it every time you mow — it only adds a few minutes and stops the edge from growing out to the point where you need the half-moon again. Grass grows fastest between April and September, so that is when regular trimming pays off most. From October onwards growth slows and the edge largely looks after itself.

If grass has crept well into the border, pulling it out by hand before you re-cut the edge makes the job neater and reduces the chance of it coming straight back. A hand fork to loosen the roots first, then pull. It is slow work but it only needs doing properly once — after that, regular trimming keeps it under control without much effort at all.

When to call a handyman

Call Richard if the lawn edges have been neglected for several seasons and need significant re-cutting and reshaping, if you would like the whole lawn doing regularly as part of a mowing visit, or if the grass has spread into beds and the beds need clearing back before re-edging makes sense. Lawn edging is included as part of Richard’s regular garden maintenance visits around Sandwich and the surrounding villages — it is the sort of thing that makes a big difference to how a garden looks but often gets skipped when time is short.