Mowing Strip

This has been a busy week, largely away from blogging.  On Tuesday I was all excited about spring, picturing an Eastern Redbud tree and a wren house, saying:

Well, the three essential ingredients of spring have hit here: the Eastern Redbuds are in full bloom, and I think the House Wrens have returned from their winter down south somewhere.  Oh, and number 3 is spring work projects, not pictured here.

Well, here's one of many spring projects:

Image credits Gary

I do a lot of dry stone walls on our estate, owing  to an abundance of both limestone and slope.  Another application is what I call a "mowing strip," pictured above, in which I edge a flower bed with flat stones sunk to ground level.  The stones are 4" to 6" wide, and the depth doesn't matter since you sink them flat.  

You could use bricks, too (or anything flat) if you have them.  The objective is to create a barrier so your grass cannot creep into the flower bed.  In the bed pictured above, the grass could not execute a vertical leap of a couple feet to reach the bed, but I do mowing strips around all my ground-level beds as well, with good results.

When cutting grass you simply put the wheels of the mower on the mowing strip and can largely avoid having to weedwhack the edges.  I weedwhack perhaps once a month during the summer, and occasionally do a judicious application of Roundup to suppress any weeds that do creep into the mowing strip.