Edge control over the advancing grass and weeds | why and how | Charles Dowding
Edges move in, more than you think. Keeping them tidy is feasible when you maintain them often, as I show here.
One exception is for new beds on strong weeds such as old pasture. The existing root system of edge plants is already strong and will keep invading for the best part of a year.
Notice how I always have a path between any weedy edge and my first bed. This makes edging so much more manageable.
Two options for tools are:
1 Long-handled shears, with blunt blades from cutting soil!
2 A half-moon edger, with some hand clearing after that.
Plus I show using a trowel to remove any deeper roots such as dandelion, or invading plants such as couch grass.
Even if you have sided beds, the edge weeds and grass can sometimes grow underneath, or seed from above, so you still need to control this edge.
When you have no wooden sides, as here, I recommend you always create and maintain a path strip between the plot edge and your first bed. In year one, cardboard is useful for this. Similar to what I show at 11:59 here.
See these two videos for more on maintaining an edge when you are not using wooden sides:
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCAZIghQmg
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDCAbWzjI80
00:00 Introduction, while demonstrating using long-handled shears - blades a little blunt!
01:05 Reason for keeping edges tidy
01:43 What to do with the cuttings
02:06 Using a half-moon edger - I demonstrate how
03:20 I follow up with a trowel
04:48 Mowing to maintain edges
05:57 Frequency of edging
06:18 Using a trowel to remove perennial weeds such as dock or dandelion root
07:42 Maintaining the edge area between bed and grass/weeds, using a copper trowel to remove perennial weeds, incl. dandelion
09:51 Carrots growing under mesh against root fly, and weeds in the bed
10:28 Harvesting some carrots - no root fly!
11:08 Another option - cardboard then woodchip
11:32 Chard growing on the edge - from plants grown for homesaved seed
11:59 I demonstrate laying cardboard on the edge, then covering with woodchip
13:53 Benefits of having a weed-free edge
14:21 Outro
Filmed at Homeacres no dig garden by Edward Dowding, mid autumn 2023.
Find more resources about no dig on my website where the bookstore has a selection of signed copies https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/store/books
You can join this channel by paying a monthly fee, to support our work with helping gardeners grow better, and to receive monthly videos made only for members:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB1J6siDdmhwah7q0O2WJBg/join
#nodig #nodiggardening #growyourownfood #growyourown #nodiggarden
Edges move in, more than you think. Keeping them tidy is feasible when you maintain them often, as I show here.
One exception is for new beds on strong weeds such as old pasture. The existing root system of edge plants is already strong and will keep invading for the best part of a year.
Notice how I always have a path between any weedy edge and my first bed. This makes edging so much more manageable.
Two options for tools are:
1 Long-handled shears, with blunt blades from cutting soil!
2 A half-moon edger, with some hand clearing after that.
Plus I show using a trowel to remove any deeper roots such as dandelion, or invading plants such as couch grass.
Even if you have sided beds, the edge weeds and grass can sometimes grow underneath, or seed from above, so you still need to control this edge.
When you have no wooden sides, as here, I recommend you always create and maintain a path strip between the plot edge and your first bed. In year one, cardboard is useful for this. Similar to what I show at 11:59 here.
See these two videos for more on maintaining an edge when you are not using wooden sides:
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCAZIghQmg
2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDCAbWzjI80
00:00 Introduction, while demonstrating using long-handled shears - blades a little blunt!
01:05 Reason for keeping edges tidy
01:43 What to do with the cuttings
02:06 Using a half-moon edger - I demonstrate how
03:20 I follow up with a trowel
04:48 Mowing to maintain edges
05:57 Frequency of edging
06:18 Using a trowel to remove perennial weeds such as dock or dandelion root
07:42 Maintaining the edge area between bed and grass/weeds, using a copper trowel to remove perennial weeds, incl. dandelion
09:51 Carrots growing under mesh against root fly, and weeds in the bed
10:28 Harvesting some carrots - no root fly!
11:08 Another option - cardboard then woodchip
11:32 Chard growing on the edge - from plants grown for homesaved seed
11:59 I demonstrate laying cardboard on the edge, then covering with woodchip
13:53 Benefits of having a weed-free edge
14:21 Outro
Filmed at Homeacres no dig garden by Edward Dowding, mid autumn 2023.
Find more resources about no dig on my website where the bookstore has a selection of signed copies https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/store/books
You can join this channel by paying a monthly fee, to support our work with helping gardeners grow better, and to receive monthly videos made only for members:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB1J6siDdmhwah7q0O2WJBg/join
#nodig #nodiggardening #growyourownfood #growyourown #nodiggarden
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LifestyleTranscript
00:11Edging the plot, so I find it really worthwhile to keep the grass edges here.
00:18It depends on your climate. Here the climate is moist and that means grass grows a lot.
00:24This edge I could have left another week actually, even though it's mid-October it's still growing,
00:30and we've been quite on top of it recently, so that's why I'm cutting an edge that's still quite short
00:34actually.
00:35But to give you an idea of methods, you can see this tool is not the best, but it can
00:41be useful.
00:42The blades are blunt because although I'm cutting grass, I'm actually often cutting through the turf edge as it creeps
00:51in,
00:52including dandelion there, I often prefer to use a trowel for that.
00:55So this is a bit of a sort of hybrid. No, this is not brilliant actually.
01:00It really needs a longer edge for this one, and I'm going to show you in a minute using a
01:04half-moon edger.
01:05The understanding is that grass and weeds around your plot will always be moving inwards, they don't stand still.
01:12That's why I would never have a grass pass between beds. You've got two edges into each bed.
01:18Here a square or circular plot is most efficient shape, that means you've got less proportion of edge to middle.
01:26We don't need to spend here much time weeding the middle, we do spend quite a bit of time on
01:31the edges.
01:31And people often comment on the clean edges here, and that's because we do keep at it about every three
01:36to four weeks during the summer.
01:37Either with these, which actually I think will sharpen before using again, or the half-moon edger.
01:43And then after, in damp weather, if it's likely to rain some more soon, we'll collect up all the, everything
01:51that I've cut there.
01:52These grassy weeds, they're not too pernicious or anything, but because there's still roots attached on them,
01:59they would regrow plain and simple if they're left there.
02:02So they can all be gathered up and put on the compost heap, it's very simple.
02:06So I'm then going to show you using a half-moon edger, which is more cutting in, and I could
02:12have used it there.
02:12It might have been easier actually, but having said that, it does cut into the ground.
02:16I don't like doing that too much, but you'll see how it works over here.
02:24This edge has been creeping in a bit, and I'm going to use the tool to bring it back, and
02:31you can do that to any edge.
02:32You could cut back into the grass and weeds along the side to make it in a slightly different position.
02:39Or if, as quite often happens in really growing weather, the whole edge has moved in without you realising.
02:45It still looks the same, maybe not too long, but actually the grass has been rooting underneath the grass.
02:52The grass is making new roots, and so you end up with losing bed space and path space.
02:58Here we have quite a bit of bindweed. This is some I removed earlier.
03:02And so I'm going to also mention or show you a bit about perennial weeds.
03:07So this one, you can either sort of do it like that, or actually it's quite effective just using your
03:14weight to push down.
03:16And moving along almost at walking speed, because I'm not trying to go too deep.
03:20I do need to cut through the main mat of roots that is there.
03:26And I'm going to follow up, as I'll show you, with a bit of trowel work.
03:33If you're going to take some edge back, you almost certainly need to use a trowel or something because...
03:40Oh yeah, look at that, there's bindweed. So, you know, I'm using the trowel again to lever out as much
03:48as I can of that.
03:50Clover. What I...
03:53My preference is to not take out too much soil at this point.
03:56Some people do, and you know, there's maybe no right and wrong in that.
04:00Because if you take out more soil, it makes...
04:04It can make a cleaner edge and easier to maintain.
04:07I just don't like putting loads of soil on the compost heap.
04:11And a little bit's good, just not too much.
04:15Yeah, that's interesting actually. These are pulling out more easily than I thought.
04:18Suggesting that some of it is quite recently rooted in here.
04:22If you try and take the edge back more than that, you will find that the grass is more rooted.
04:28It's also pretty much perfect level of moisture, as you can see.
04:32Moist without being too wet.
04:34That was a bit of extra clover root.
04:37And we're going to come up...
04:38Yeah, there's nothing too bad here, actually.
04:40I'm quite impressed there's not too much bindweed.
04:43I thought there would be more.
04:44We've been removing a lot of bindweed from this edge.
04:48But the other thing that we've been doing, and which really helps to maintain an edge, is mowing.
04:54So every seven to ten days on average through the summer months, or say from March even to now,
05:04we're cutting this grass fairly short.
05:06And that reduces the vigor of whatever's growing in it.
05:09More than if it was left to grow long.
05:11So that reduces the speed at which it invades into the plot.
05:15And reduces how much edging you need to do.
05:17So, mowing is sort of one part of it.
05:20Keeping the edge short.
05:23Reducing vigor.
05:24If there was, for example, couch grass here.
05:27This would not be so straightforward.
05:29But you can see how the edging tool has made that easy for me.
05:33If I now remove it and try and come along without having edged.
05:38If I go on a bit more.
05:41Some of this soil, by the way, looks nice because a bit of compost and wood chip has come from
05:46the growing area.
05:49But if I now go forwards without using the edger, it's still possible to remove this grass.
05:54But it's not going to make a nice, neat edge.
05:57And why bother to have a neat edge?
05:59It's just a lot easier to maintain if you've got a straight edge around your plot.
06:02And you can see it's not a hugely long job.
06:06It just needs doing reasonably regularly.
06:09We might use this tool every two months maybe.
06:14Maybe three times a year.
06:16Maybe every three months.
06:18And then one other thing I would use the trowel for is, sometimes before even using the edging tool,
06:23to lever out a bit of extra dock in this case, or dandelion root.
06:29Because they are always spreading in the leaves of a dandelion, for example.
06:35You can see here that that dandelion has actually got its root quite inside, away from the edge.
06:41But it's already, this time of year, leafing into the edge area.
06:46And then that can shelter grasses.
06:49So you can hear that scrunch is where, you know, this is not actually eliminating this dandelion,
06:54but it's weakening it a lot, getting out that much root.
06:57And then that's not shading grass.
07:00It just makes edge maintenance easier sometimes to go along with the trowel
07:03and take out the bigger perennial weeds around your plot.
07:07And you can see that in more detail in the last bit I'm going to show you,
07:11which is where the perennial weeds have really taken over.
07:15We left them deliberately, actually, so that you can see what happens.
07:18You know, this all looks beautifully tidy, as is often noted.
07:22And that is because we keep at it.
07:24But I would say it's little and often rather than loads and often.
07:28You know, it actually doesn't take too long.
07:29But as long as you're regular with use of these tools, it's not a difficult job.
07:42And this is one further aspect of edging, which is not about the edge creeping in,
07:48but what can happen near to, say, grass and weeds if you don't look after or maintain the area of
07:56path alongside it.
07:58Because always I'll have that, a pathway between whatever's growing, grass, weeds, whatever that we're mowing, and the bed itself.
08:08So, what happens in that pathway?
08:10Sometimes we put wood chip down to, that doesn't smother the weeds because we're not putting on enough thickness for
08:16that.
08:16But it helps to feed the soil and reduce the weed growth and make them easier to remove.
08:21But you've still got some weeding to do.
08:23I mean, look at this. Look how many weeds are here. It's incredible.
08:26What happened is, we've left this partly for the video, but just to demonstrate.
08:31We took back the edge without removing the dandelions that were growing already.
08:38So you can see how much root there is.
08:40These are dandelions from really old, strong roots.
08:45I'm disturbing this all more than I'd like, really.
08:47But in this case, it's a one-off.
08:50If you can get that much root out, say, of the dandelion,
08:54then the subsequent regrowth is going to be very weak and easy to just pull out, probably.
09:02It depends, always.
09:03And a lot of the time, I'll just do this.
09:06Copper trowel's brilliant for this because it doesn't rust.
09:09It stays sharp and clean and just makes life easier when you're using it quite a bit.
09:14Here's some more dandelions that are growing very close to the edge.
09:17So, this is one approach.
09:19If you've got such a lot of weeds as this, yeah,
09:23these are really well-established old dandelions.
09:27And before putting anything on, which I'm going to show you next,
09:33like, even if you put cardboard on dandelion like that,
09:37the dandelion's going to survive for longer than the cardboard.
09:42So I'll just remove that one again.
09:44So in other words, I would remove well-established perennial weeds close to an edge.
09:50And then another thing that's going on here is carrots growing in under the mesh.
09:59And the mesh cover, which in theory is to keep out the carrot root flow,
10:04it's not always working, actually.
10:07More or less.
10:08These were sown a bit later though.
10:10These were sown on July the 5th.
10:13So that's only three months ago.
10:15And you can see how, because we got mesh on,
10:18we haven't really been looking at the weeds.
10:19And that's an annual meadow grass, which is already flowering and not far from seeding.
10:26So that's definitely worth removing.
10:29And I could just pull a carrot just to see what's going on here.
10:33Oh, I think this one might be forked a bit.
10:35That's not too bad.
10:37Yeah, we haven't, no, we did thin these actually.
10:40So that's a crazy one.
10:41These look promising.
10:43That's encouraging because we're, they're very clean.
10:49No root fly on them.
10:52Excellent.
10:52I'm really pleased by that.
10:53We actually had carrots in this bed just two years ago.
10:57I'm not looking too much at rotation.
10:59And that's compost on top, which was put on last December.
11:02We've, no November even, because we've had broad beans in there since.
11:05So these carrots were sown after the broad beans finished.
11:08And I'm going to show you just one further option.
11:10I'll do it up here actually, because we have a lot of grassy weeds.
11:16And grassy weeds can be not so much difficult,
11:19but because they can sometimes be so numerous,
11:23as you see here, it's quicker perhaps to put cardboard on top with a bit of,
11:30oh, I've brought the wrong bucket, wood chip on top.
11:32I just mentioned there's something else growing here, which is chard.
11:35And that's from where we saved seed of chard.
11:39Not right here actually, but further up the bed.
11:43And when you save vegetable seeds, there's nearly always quite a few that fall on the ground
11:49before you harvest the plants or even while you're harvesting the plants.
11:53And so they can be, not exactly a weed, but they're a bit prevalent after that.
11:57So again, before putting the cardboard, I'm just taking out the dandelion.
12:01Then I'm going to put the cardboard on here.
12:05Just to show you this, this is an option.
12:07If you've got a really weedy edge, even you can do this if you want to take the edge back
12:13a bit,
12:14and put the cardboard there.
12:16But you do need to put enough weight on here that whatever's growing there can't just lift it up,
12:21because when the cardboard gets wet, it tends to crinkle and rise up a bit at the edge.
12:25So it's not an obvious solution, but if you do it carefully.
12:29I've done this before in December. I did it last December on an edge.
12:33And actually that was very effective because the grass wasn't trying to grow.
12:37The other thing with cardboard is if you put it on a grass weed like that,
12:42and there's just a tiny blade of grass popping out the side, that would regrow.
12:46So you could just pop that back in underneath.
12:48Always overlap cardboard when you're using it, so about that much overlap.
12:52So it's about light exclusion basically, and that one needs to come out.
12:56That's looking pretty good.
12:57And I'm just going to finish off by doing one more thing,
13:00which is I've got in this bucket some beautiful old wood chip.
13:05And this is pure wood chip here.
13:09You know, it's almost, well it is compost basically.
13:12But I feel it's a nice mulch food for the soil life.
13:18Once, what happens here is that the, although this is quite dry,
13:23that's a bit of vine weed, get rid of that.
13:25And I'm just putting on enough to hold the cardboard down.
13:29I'm not trying to massively raise the level or anything.
13:32I want the level, if anything, to stay a bit below this grass.
13:35So that's all good. Cardboard right up to the edge.
13:38And this cardboard will decompose within 8 to 10 weeks.
13:41That's what it does once it's damped.
13:43And then this beautiful compost like wood chip will be eaten by soil life and taken in a soil fertility.
13:52And that's one of the central tenets of no dig.
13:56It's a very easy way of feeding the soil through feeding the soil life.
14:00And having a healthy weed free path and edge is helping vegetables in the nearby bed to grow.
14:09Because all vegetable roots spread a long way sideways.
14:13And so even these carrots will be sending out some little roots that we can't see into this path soil.
14:18And so having a clean path here will be helping them.
14:21And so I hope you've enjoyed having a look at this edging, which is, can be a fun job.
14:26If you keep on top of it, it's much more fun.
14:28So keep out your edges, little and often, and enjoy the look.
14:32And it's really reassuring then to come out in the garden and see a nice clean edge.
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