Installing Mow Strips

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Carol A. Crotta

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Mow strips not only make cutting your grass easier, they protect your plantings from becoming accidental victims of mower blades.

As anyone who’s mowed a lawn can tell you, the edges are the toughest part to keep trim. Flower bed plantings often spill out onto lawns, making it difficult to get a fine edge without inflicting damage on adjacent plants. And if you’ve got one of the more aggressive grasses in your lawn (like St. Augustine grass or Bermuda grass), they can invade your beds over time, making keeping your yard tidy even harder – unless the grass is stopped by the hard edge of a mow strip.

What’s a mow strip? It’s sort of a demilitarized zone between your lawn and your beds, where a mower can traverse safely to cut the lawn’s edge without mowing down and chopping up half of your annuals and perennials.

Mow strips can be made of many materials of varying durability, including concrete, brick, pavers, vinyl or wood benderboard, vinyl, aluminum, recycled plastic or ironwork, and they make lawn care infinitely easier. They also provide a finishing touch that can greatly add to your garden’s appearance and even enhance a certain garden style like an English country border or a Mediterranean garden. No matter which mow strip materials you use, they’re all installed in roughly the same manner.

Installing benderboard is less labor-intensive than masonry, but it still creates a visual break between beds and lawn. These borders are less protective of your plants since no real “mowing zone” is created, but the benefit is that they’re not as permanent: If you want to change the shape of your lawn or planting bed, all you need to do is tear out the benderboard and put it in a new location. The drawback of benderboard is that the materials tend to warp and deteriorate over time with exposure to the elements – even if they’re made of recycled plastic.

The attractive mow strip shown here is constructed by building a simple benderboard form, filling it with concrete and finishing it with a fitted-block motif. Once it’s in place, only the decorative top surface and a bit of the sides are visible, framing your lawn. Mow strips for an entire front yard can be completed in a single weekend. Assemble the necessary materials and follow the simple steps shown in the pictures and described in the captions for best results.

No matter which type of mow strip or border you choose to install, you can count on the fact your mowing chore will get easier – and you’ll be adding an attractive feature to your garden.

Tips

If you’re planning to install both a sprinkler system and mow strips, be sure to place the supply pipes for the sprinklers at least 1 foot away from the mow strip on the lawn side so you can easily repair the irrigation system if you need to.
If you don’t want to build an actual mow strip, you can purchase different types of decorative borders, typically 6-12 inches long. You’ll just need to dig a narrow trench deep enough so that the tops of the border are level with the ground when the pieces are inserted.

Tools

Many species of grass quickly spill over the edges of walks and driveways by spreading underground tillers and stolons from their parent plants. There are good tools out there to keep the grass right where it’s supposed to be. Use lawn clippers, motorized or manual lawn edgers, or string trimmers to cut through the roots. Motorized edgers do the best job, making a knifelike vertical cut down the mow strip and through the grass and roots.

Faqs

Q: How wide should a mow strip be?
A: Look at your lawn mower’s wheels. Typically they’re 1-2 inches wide. At the surface, your mow strip should be at least twice as wide as the wheels on your mower. Also keep in mind that all mow strips should extend at least 6 inches deep into the soil to keep turfgrasses from invading your flower beds.

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