Bed Head

Jeffrey made the bed! Well, he actually made five or six. Landscape beds, that is. (But he's actually really helpful with the mattress kind, too!)

We've had edging our landscaping on the brain lately, so we rented a bed edger last Wednesday from a local equipment rental facility and got busy. Jeff practiced first on a few less critical areas in the backyard, like a new kidney shaped shade garden I wanted to experiment with under the tulip magnolia.

We really dig it! It works like a trencher, carving out a two to four inch deep channel, but it has a curved edge on one side to pile the soil neatly up and away into the bed. It makes those perfect "golf course" edges you see and love.

Thursday began the edging in earnest, with the reworking of our foundation beds to include the new walkway beds and incorporate the giant gardenia.

Just for the record, if you decide to try this yourself, have plenty of marking paint on hand! I had a partial can and bought a second just in case, and we ended up running through all of it and spray-painting the grass with gloss white, flat black, primer, and whatever else I had hanging around the garage! 

After Jeff trenched, I shaped the existing soil into a sloped profile. Our next step will be trucking in additional top soil and compost to raise the beds (for aesthetics as well as drainage and soil amendment purposes). And then of course the planting of more shrubs, annuals, and perennials. Back breaking work, but we think it will be worth the effort.