Better Design with Landscape Edging

Nothing sets apart a yard better than incorporating landscape edging. It can be used as a defining element and also as an excellent way to draw the eye's attention to a focal point. Not only is it the perfect finishing touch, landscape edging also serves a practical use. It's it's one of the best ways of keeping grass and weeds from growing into your flower beds and it'll help keep the soil and mulch in your garden from washing away.

A Multitude of Landscape edging choices.

Next time you're out working in your garden, consider ways to take advantage of this easy way to add instant curb appeal to your home. Once you start shopping for landscape edging you'll quickly realize that it's available in a wide range of styles and prices. There are a number of natural and man-made materials to choose from including plastic, wood, metal, stone, cement and brick.

A common option is using stones and with so many stone colors and sizes available today, it's easy to mix and match them to create a landscape edging look that's truly unique.

Another excellent choice is Wood for landscape edging material. You can use railroad ties, pieces of timber or sections that are already made so all you need to do is measure and install. Since exposure to the elements is inevitable, consider choosing cedar, cypress or redwood as these woods are the most resistant to rot and insects.

If You want to achieve a look that's totally natural and seamless, why not choose colorful flowering plants or green shrubs? Take a trip to your local garden center to see the many options including those that have been especially designed for use as landscape edging.

An other option is metal landscape edging. It is both durable and versatile, but because of its ability to be molded into different shapes, the finished look can vary considerably. Your choices can include a pattern that's very simple or you can hire a professional to custom-create an elaborate filigree design.

With its many colors and shapes plastic is a practical and popular choice in landscape edging. It's generally less expensive than other materials and it's weather-resistant.

There are so many choices!

With the abundance of landscape edging options available, your biggest challenge will likely be choosing the one that's right for your yard. If you're feeling overwhelmed, you can do what others do. Take a drive and see how your neighbors are using landscape edging.Take along your camera so that later on you'll be able to remember the designs that captured your attention.

Gardening 101 - Why Install a Landscape Edging?

Gardens and landscaping provide aesthetic value to your home. Placing different kinds of plants and flowers in front, around or even in your backyard give a refreshing and cozy feel to your house. Gardens take out the harshness and coldness associated with modern urbanity and instead bringing a splash of color to the surroundings. But many shy away from keeping a garden because they fear that they don't have time or the patience for maintaining it. But these problems can easily be solved because there are ways to make maintenance of gardens easier. Installing a landscape edging is one such move. Installing this accessory make it easier for owners to cultivate and enjoy their gardens.

A garden could be first fixed by a landscape artist but when the owner's left on his own for the garden's maintenance, problems arise. One of the difficulties associated with gardens is the problems with delineating spaces and grass. There are certain areas where grasses and plants grow out of place, and so they tend to cross over walk ways and other spaces in the garden. This problem can be solved by installing a landscape edging around areas in the garden where plants and grasses are concentrated and arranged. Landscape edgings can either be simple trenches or pieces of tile, brick, plaster or plastic embedded into the soil around the landscape arrangements. They help define the spaces in your garden.

Because landscape edgings help define and differentiate spaces in your garden, you can now take care of it with ease. Landscape edgings help you determine the areas where grasses and other weeds are not supposed to grow and you can now make moves to take control. There are edgings designed to conform to the edges of conventional lawn mowers. They are designed so that the mower can use them as "tracks" making it easy to mow hard to reach grasses near the edgings. They also ensure the health of your plants because edgings prevent the spread of weeds if placed around plant beds. If they are deep enough (in the case of trench-type edgings) or deeply embedded (in the case of tile or plaster edgings), the long roots of weeds called stolons cannot reach the soil in your plant bed. These stolons, if uncontrolled, would grow into new grass blades. Therefore, placing landscape edgings would spare you from the hassles of spraying herbicide often or worse, getting down on your knees and pulling them out.

Besides these benefits, landscape edgings also provide aesthetic value to your garden. Trenches could be otherwise plain, but choosing bricks, tile or even plastic edgings with different designs and shapes will give your garden a good aesthetic boost. There are many kinds available in the market and so you can surely find the one that's right for your budget and needs.

The Many Uses Of Landscape Edging

Landscape edging is useful for a variety of reasons within your yard or garden. There are a large variety of styles to choose from, but landscape edging is not always used just for decoration. It's often handy to help separate various areas of your yard, contain invasive plants, or keep the grass out of flower or tree beds. Let's look at several ways landscape edging can be both useful and beautiful in your yard.

1. Around trees - Using landscape edging around your trees can help keep the grass, ground covers, or other vines and plants from invading the space designated just for your trees. These plants can sometimes steal the water your trees need, before that water is able to soak deeply enough into the ground to be beneficial to the trees. So putting landscape edging around your trees is an excellent way to make the yard look much more professionally finished, but it also helps your trees to grow strong and healthy.

Try putting your landscape edging several feet away from the trunks of the trees, then fill the interior area with a nice looking mulch or bark to give it a finishing touch. This bark and mulch will also help protect your trees from drying out too quickly in the summer, or being damaged by cold in the winter.

2. Around your yard - Using landscape edging around the border of a simple grass yard helps it looks more valuable and attractive, without adding the additional maintenance and water needs that comes with putting in plants, flowers, bushes or trees.

An added bonus of putting landscape edging around your grass yard, is that the grass will not be able to invade your walkways as easily, and keeping the edges trimmed is also much easier when you have edging in place too.

3. Around flower beds - Landscape edging is an excellent way to section off various areas of your yard and garden for specific plants or flowers. If you like having showy annual flowers along your walkway for instance, putting some decorative landscape edging on the outside of those is a quick and easy way to dress things up a bit.

Alternatively, if you have flower beds in place already, say in front of the house, you can make them look more elegant and upscale by simply placing a nice edging around what's already there.

If you don't want trees or bushes in your yard, or you want the yard to look pretty and finished quickly, try putting circular or other stylish arrangements of landscape edging in the middle of your yard, then planting some pretty, colorful flowers which bloom all season. You can even use landscape edging to make raised flower beds too.

Regardless of where you decide to put your landscape edging, you can make it more interesting and unique by putting in in various shapes. A standard square or circle is fine of course, but you'll add much more interest and class to your yard by creating a figure eight shape around a few trees for instance, or creating a curvy, snake like design along the edge of a flower bed or around the outside of your yard.

Landscape Edging Ideas

There are many beautiful ways to add some finishing touches to your landscaping and gardening projects, and putting in landscape edging is just one way to give your yard a finished, polished, and professional look. So let's review some great landscape edging ideas that are simple and easy to put into place almost anywhere.

1. Wood Landscape Edging Ideas - There are a variety of wooden landscape edgings that can be purchased at any home and garden store, hardware store, or regular discount stores such as Walmart or Kmart too. You can buy standard two by four or six by four wood pieces and cut them to size, or buy small round pieces of wood which look like miniature tree trunks.

When using wood landscape edging, make it decorative by varying the heights and sizes of wood pieces. If for instance, you're using the round wood pieces, put a 6 inch one in place, then a 4 inch high piece next to that, then a 2 inch high piece, then another 4 inch piece, then another 6 inch piece. Repeat this pattern around the edge of your landscaped areas.

Railroad ties are another excellent way to create wooden landscaping edges, and sometimes these can be picked up at no cost from a variety of job sites in your local area.

One of my favorite ideas for wooden landscape edging, is to use long and unusual looking branches from trees or bushes. Sometimes you'll find fallen tree branches that have unusual shapes and textures, and these can make wonderful borders and edges for your landscaping projects.

2. Stone Landscape Edging Ideas - Using stone to create your landscape edges gives you a lot of variety, style, and freedom for creativity. You could go for a hike for instance, and collect stones in a variety of sizes to take home with you. Check to be sure this is legal where you live first though. Or you could go to a local nursery or home and garden center, and select a variety of stone sizes.

Set the stones up side by side in an attractive pattern, or place them several inches to several feet apart. Alternatively, put large stones a few feet apart, with smaller ones side by side between them.

Many decorative pathway style stones can also be bought almost anywhere. These are designed to be laid flat to create walkways with, but they make beautiful landscape edges and borders too. Simply turn them on their side, and bury them into the ground about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way so they're standing upright. This is even prettier when you plant some annual colorful flowers, such as pansies or vincas in front of each stone.

Concrete and brick are similar but alternative options to using actual stone. Using these also gives you a wide variety of decorative patterns that will make your landscape edging stand out from the crowd.

3. Plastic Landscape Edging Ideas - There are many different styles of inexpensive landscape edging materials made from plastic, and available at almost any store. Some of these are designed to look like small picket fences, while others are meant to look like cobblestone, brick, or wood borders themselves.

All it takes is a little bit of thought and creativity, plus a trip or two to browse some of the materials available at your local garden center, and you'll soon be bursting with your own unique landscape edging ideas!

Landscaping Edging

Choose Your Landscaping Edging

Well organized and separated landscaping can make an ordinary home look extraordinary. Likewise, poorly landscaped grounds can turn a stunning home into a dull one. Plan well and execute your landscaping plans flawlessly. If it seems that your new yard is still looking a little messy despite new plants and constant care, try turning to edging for landscaping to better define the lines of your yard. You have several types of edging available to choose from. The choice is yours.

Simplest of Solutions

The simplest of edging available is literally the earth itself. Digging a small trench, to separate your plants from other landscaping, can make an elegant, simple, and inexpensive choice. The drawback from the simple is you must redo the trench each year. The next simplest for of edging, is to use rail road ties or old pieces of wood to separate the trenches. This can look nice but also may need to be replaced from time to time as the wood deteriorates.

Metal and Plastic Edging

Metal and plastic landscape edging are similar in that they will most often resemble long, thin strips for defining the different areas of your yard. Plastic edging is inexpensive and also easy to install. It also comes in different shapes and styles but is very basic. With the ease of install and the ease of maintenance comes the fact that metal and plastic edging is not frilly in any manner. It will not add to the overall beauty of your yard.

Harder Materials

When it comes landscaping edging, the best durability is going to come from stone, concrete, or brick edging. These materials are durable and will hold up better over the years than other materials, but in exchange are more expensive to purchase. If you choose edging with separate stones, you also have to decide whether or not to mortar the stones, which will prevent weeds and grass from growing up between. Such edgings for your landscaping also give you a variety of options in shapes and shades, and certainly help to make a statement that adds to the beauty to the yard while still being functional. However, whether you buy bricks or use a spade to cut your own edges in the yard, proper edging for your landscaping will help the look you've picked to continue to stand out with the clean lines intended, and keep your yard beautiful.

Tag : Landscape Edging,Edging,Landscape