We — many of us — love our yards. We love to look out on a nice day and see a manicured lawn. We love a well-groomed hedge. We love a lush garden, full of flowers and vegetables. We love to know that we made our homes beautiful.
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But it is more than our homes that we beautify when we attend to our yards. Our lives are so tied up in where we live and what we do with our time, that it is possible (even unavoidable) to make a more beautiful, serene life by putting the time into our yards. Do you want to beautify your life? Then maybe you need to beautify your yard.
Why Use a Lawn Edger
As you take the steps to beautify your lawn, and with it your life, you will find that you need to trim the edges of your yard. You will have mowed the grass, but all along the edges, wherever there is something freestanding such as a fence or a tree to interrupt the lawn mower, the grass will not have been cut by the mower. That is why they make lawn edgers.
We have all seen them in action — often loud, sometimes weighty, roaring and ripping and tearing, whirring as they spin with barely more than a shield on side of the spinning cutter. This is enough to scare a lot of us away from using edgers, since they are a little more unwieldy than, for instance, a lawn mower.
But these are not to be feared. In fact, they are quite useful and once you get the hang of it they are easy and perfectly safe to use. If you need to edge your lawn, then you should know how to use one, so here are the basic steps:
Put on Safety Equipment
In general, this means wearing safety goggles at minimum. Googles here are better than glasses, since there may be some debris flying. If you have sensitive ears or if the unit your using is particularly loud, then you may want to consider ear protection. This can take the form of ear plugs or over the ear protection. You may, if you have allergies, want to also wear some kind of mask over your mouth. You can buy small, lightweight masks at most hardware stores. Finally, you may want to wear gloves, and if you’re going to then you may want to find heavy duty construction gloves to wear.
Set the Length of The Wire
If you are cutting with a plastic wire (you usually will be) then you need to set the length of the wire before cutting. You don’t want it so long that it hits the guard on the hedger, but you also don’t want it too short or else it will not cut well. Generally, this amounts to opening the casing where the wire is (while the machine is off of course) and pulling some out or wrapping some up inside.
Start the Edger
Holding the edger away from your body, you can start it. If it is a gas-powered trimmer, then you may need to pull a cord. This is when it will get loud, and it can be a bit tricky to start it and hold it away from you at the same time, but you will get the hand of it.
Get Trimming!
Now it’s time to trim your grass. Lower the spinning end of the edger slowly down to the grass, being sure to keep it as level as possible, and allow it to cut the grass in front of you. Try to maintain the same grass height as the lawn around it (for aesthetic purposes). Walk left or right to move the edger around the area until it is uniformly trimmed. Once that area is finished, turn off the spinning of the machine and walk to the next area to edge.
That’s It!
It is neither a difficult nor scary thing to do once you know what you’re doing. A little bit of practice and you will be a pro.
