I recently took advantage of the local sawmill's annual bark chip sale and two seven-cubic-metre loads of garden mulch was towered in a pile across the visitors' car park space. It called for immediate action and since the man was crippled with sciatic agonies at the time it was left up to, guess who?
Several weeks and many barrow loads later (and a nasty infection due to the inhalation of busy little fugal folk working the chippings), we were able to look with some satisfaction at the well defined areas, boundary hedges, tree base surrounds, shrubbery and island gardens covered in effective weed-smothering, moisture-laden bark.
The joy was short lived. Our healthily expanding garden colony of blackbirds and thrush took enormous excitable delight in threshing these tidy realms by tossing, scrabbling and scolding at this fresh hunting ground rich in grubby fodder to sustain their fledgling families. I tried to patiently rake back the edgings in fear the mower blades became blunt and buckled on scattered chippings and sprayed increasingly wider borders of grass to reduce the necessity of trudging around those difficult areas with the hand mower.
Garden edgings can make all the difference to the appearance and workability of your property and there is a wealth of ideas and suitable materials that can be used on a sliding scale to suit one's budget. Most of us need to structure our gardens while searching for solutions to contain and define specific areas. The options are endless - fences, wire, post and pole, palings, railings, link and chain, brick wall, dry stone rock and schist, banks and ditches, raised beds and sunken gardens.
Crisp lawn edging can be achieved with a sharp spade or a rolling edge cutter to curtail encroaching kikuyu tendrils that thrive despite the drought. If, like me, your gloriously haphazard garden is achieved on a shoestring - look to using recycled materials. Flowerbeds can be edged with rocks, old bricks, ponga posts, old guttering, railway sleepers or filled upturned wine or plastic drinks bottles. Several tea tree posts or lengths of bamboo can provide a horizontal rustic edging supported by upright pegging in the same material. There are plenty of commercial edgings of sturdy green upright plastic between lawn and path that allows neat close cutting of the mower, rolls of short wooden palings on wire which looks effective encircling tree bases and pre-shaped concrete curbings give a clean line between flower bed and lawn or pathway.
