How To Use A Weed Whacker For Razor Sharp Garden Edges

When you have garden beds next to your grass, it can difficult to keep the two spaces separate. Your plants may try to grow outside the boundaries of the garden, settling into grass. This can leave your yard looking a little disorganized. If you want to clean up those edges without having to work on your hands and knees to pull wandering plants, TikTok user @JustGardens has shared how to use your weed whacker, turned upside-down, to easily clean up the edges of your garden beds. Because the string trimmer can create straight lines pretty easily in this position, it will give you the crisp edge that you want between your garden and your lawn.

Before trying this hack, be sure you know how to avoid mistakes with the weed whacker that could damage your plants. Turning the head of the weed whacker can potentially expose you to injuries from bits of plants flying at high speed. Wear safety goggles to prevent eye injuries, and make sure to turn the head of the machine so that the deflector shield is between the spinning string and your body. The shield can block some of these flying plants from hitting you. Additionally, be sure you practice this trick a few times on the lawn before heading to your garden beds, or you risk damaging your plants on your first pass.

You normally use a string trimmer or weed whacker to clip grass and weeds around obstacles that are tough to reach with a mower and hold the trimmer head so the deflector shield is at the top and toward you, blocking chopped plants from flying upward. The spinning string would be on the bottom, horizontally aligned to the cut that you want to make.

But when you want to use it to edge garden beds and strips of grass, you simply need to hold the weed whacker in an upright position. Use the handle to twist the head of the weed whacker upside down so that the line of string will be spinning parallel to the straight edge that you want to create.

Hold the trimmer at a height where the string is just barely touching the soil. Then begin slowly walking along the edge where you want to create the straight line, continuing to hold the trimmer so that the string is vertically aligned. As you move along the edge that you want to cut, the string should chop the edges off the overgrown shrubs and plants, leaving behind a perfectly straight edge.