Designing, planting, and maintaining garden beds takes time, but the process is more straightforward, requires less work, and produces more attractive gardens when you follow a few simple recommendations. The first recommendation concerns the initial landscaping design and outlining the garden beds. Rather than trying to picture the edge of the garden bed in your head, use a hose to mark the garden edge, moving the hose as needed to consider alternate layouts.
The hose’s flexibility also helps you create beds with borders that have more natural and attractive curves.
Once you have the garden borders defined, you will dig along them to keep the surrounding grass out of the garden bed. You can create a border using bricks, plastic, or other means, but a practical approach is to use a garden bed edging tool that digs six to eight inches deep. Use the edger to create a small border trench and fill it with mulch.
Using an edger and mulch will keep the grass from entering the garden bed for most of the current season. The process also becomes easier and more effective when repeated each year. While this approach requires more work at the beginning of each growing season, it largely eliminates the otherwise ongoing need to pull grass from your garden bed throughout the season.
