How to edge a lawn properly

An edge is the difference between a mown lawn and a finished one, and it is the only lawn job where five minutes of work is visible from the street for a fortnight. It is also the job most often done with the wrong tool.

Blade or line: they are different jobs

Depth: the knob nobody adjusts

EGO publishes up to 3 inches of edging depth on the EA0800, adjusted with a knob and a guide wheel rather than a wrench. Three inches is a lot — that is a trench-cutting setting for a border that has not been touched in years. For a maintained edge you want the shallowest setting that severs the runners, because every extra inch is more soil to sweep up and more load on the motor.

1. First pass of the year: set the depth to cut through the turf mat and just into the soil beneath it. Slow walking pace.
2. Maintenance passes: shallower. You are re-cutting a line that already exists.
3. Never deeper than you need. A deeper cut does not make the edge last longer; it makes the cleanup longer.

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How much edge you get per charge

The EA0800 is the most transparently specified tool on this entire site: EGO publishes a runtime for four different pack sizes, which almost nobody does. That lets us do something unusual — check whether the draw is constant.

Two thousand feet of edge on the smallest pack is more edge than most suburban properties have. Which means the honest advice on battery sizing for edging is: buy the pack for the mower, and the edger will never be the tool that runs you out of charge.

The method

1. Mow first. Cutting the lawn to height makes the edge line visible and stops long grass hiding the border.
2. Walk on the hard surface. Wheel on the path, blade against the turf. The wheel is your straight edge.
3. Work in one direction along each run. Back-and-forth passes produce a wandering line.
4. Sweep or blow the spoil back onto the lawn or into the bed, not down a storm drain. On paths this is where a blower on its lowest setting earns its place.
5. Finish with the string trimmer around anything the edger cannot reach: posts, downpipes, tree bases.

If a trimmer is all you have

Turning a string trimmer on its side works for maintaining an edge that has already been cut. Use the heavier line gauge if you have the choice — the EGO ST1521S and the Ryobi RY402110 both specify 0.095 inch, against the 0.080 inch on the lighter Greenworks. Line gauge, feed systems and what the twist is for are covered on the trimmer line guide.

What a trimmer will not do is cut a new edge on a border that has grown over. It throws soil rather than slicing it, the line wears fast against grit, and the result is a scalloped line rather than a straight one.

How much edge you have, and how often to cut it

Most people underestimate their edge length by half. It is not just the driveway: it is every path, every bed, the garage apron, the shed base and the fence line if the mower cannot reach it. Pace it once and the answer stops being a guess.

Even the largest of those fits inside one small pack, which is worth knowing before you buy a bigger one. The variable that actually costs you time is the first cut of the season, when the turf has grown over the border and you are removing material rather than re-cutting a line.

Frequency through the season

Edging is a maintenance job that follows the mowing calendar rather than the calendar proper. In peak growth the mower is out weekly or more — the one-third rule sets that pace — and every second or third mow is enough to keep an established edge crisp. In late season, when growth slows, so does this.

The one thing not to do is skip a whole season and then try to fix it in one afternoon. Grass runners spread over a border faster than they look like they are doing, and reopening a badly overgrown edge is the deep-cut job that takes three inches of blade depth, a wheelbarrow of spoil and an hour you did not plan for.

What we cannot tell you

• Edging pace. The 0.5 MPH figure is our stated assumption so the arithmetic is checkable. Nobody publishes an edging speed.
• Blade life. Not published, and it depends entirely on how much grit you cut through.
• How the attachment feels against a dedicated wheeled edger. We have not used either.