Keep a Fruit Tree Small
Cutting a young fruit tree off at knee height to force low scaffold branches, holding a full-size variety at a height you can reach from the ground.
Cut a Clean Edge on a Mulched Bed by Raking the Mulch Back First
Technique: Edge a Mulched Bed
The Problem
Edging a bed that's already mulched is a different job from edging bare soil, and treating it the same way makes a mess of both.
A half-moon edger cuts soil and roots cleanly. It does not cut bark mulch — the blade snags, rides over the chips, and wanders off the line instead of slicing it. Push harder and you drive mulch down into the soil, which is exactly where you don't want it: mixed into the top few inches of the bed rather than sitting on top of it as a layer. Meanwhile the mulch that does get flung out lands on the lawn.
The Technique
- Rake the mulch back off the edge first. Pull it a few inches into the bed, clear of where the blade will go, so you're cutting soil and nothing else. Save what you pull back — it goes straight back afterwards, so nothing is lost.
- Check which way the edger's lip faces. The blade has a lip that curls to one side. Turn the tool so that lip faces into the bed, not out toward the lawn.
- Set the blade on your line, stomp down on the shoulder of the tool with your foot, and drive it in to full depth.
- Lever the handle back to pop the cut open. With the lip facing into the bed, the leverage lifts against the bed side. With it facing the other way, the lip digs into your lawn as you pull back and tears a ragged strip out of it — which is the single thing that makes a hand-edged line look bad.
- Work along the line, overlapping each cut slightly so there are no un-cut bridges between plunges.
- Clear the loose soil and severed roots out of the trench, then rake the mulch back up to the fresh edge.
Pro tip: The creator's view is that hand edging beats any powered edger for this, and the reason is control rather than nostalgia — a hand tool goes in vertically to a depth you choose, one bite at a time, so it follows a curve exactly and stops where the roots are. It is genuinely more work; the trade is a line that doesn't need correcting.
Pro tip: Raking the mulch back with your hands rather than a rake is worth it near planting. A rake in a mulched bed pulls up as much soil and shallow root as it does bark, and it catches the crowns of anything low-growing along the edge.
Safety note: Know what's under the line before you drive a blade to full depth — irrigation lines, low-voltage lighting cable and dog-fence wire all get run along bed edges precisely because it's soft ground. If a bed edge is new to you, call before you dig rather than finding a cable with your foot behind the tool.
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