Tidying up the stragglers

I've cut my lawn into a 2.5m circle, scarred, aerated, overseeded and fed. Everything has worked great and my lawn is looking and feeling really healthy. The only downside i have is that during the overseeding (i'm guessing because of the wind) some of the seed has found it's way into my border around the circle.

Instead of the mind-numbingly, tedious task of pulling up single strands of grass, is there anything that i can do to try and remove this grass from the borders? I've turned the ground over a couple of times but this seems to have just made it grow more!!

I don't want to use anything weedkiller(ish) on the borders for obvious reasons, but i didn't know if there was anything that i could put down on the border that would kill the lawn but not ruin the soil and kill everything else nearby?

Might sound stupid i know, but it's looking a bit messy at the moment and i want to try and contain the lawn to within the edged circle.

Any help would be much appreciated

 

Hi @pkrns Had the same problem as you when I did my lawn.

Luckily I had a two week holiday so when I got my stragglers were clumps... Far easier to pull out. :-) I used the clumps on a few bare patches on the lawn which helped too.

Other than remove them by hand, cant think of what else you can do really. Sorry chap.

 

Sounds like a plan! I'll leave it for a while and see how bad it'll get. Hopefully it'll clump up so that i can grab a handful and not just single blades

 

@JWK, weirdly i don't... i have a 5 pronged fork however... would that suffice?

 

It looks like your lawn is raised above the ground around it. Grass roots grow down to four or five inches so there is a possibility that some of the extra growth is from spreading roots in the main lawn. The only way to stop that spread is to lay something around the lawn down below the root depth.

The growth you have outside the lawn now is down to elbow grease unfortunately, but Guesty's was a good idea.

 

I'm not a rep for Wolf Garten or anything but their Ducth hoes (hand-held or large version) would get under the grass the roots and pull them straight up.

An even easier job would be with their large weed cultivator. I call mine Jack. Jack the ripper because he rips everything out down to about 4 inches. Not good if your borders are full of bulbs but great for destroying weed roots and pulling stuff up in many instances.

 

My garden fork does both those jobs Mowerman.

 

Not with the grace, style and utter brutality that Jack does it. I hate forking, it's so hit and miss with fine sproutings of grass but they are great for nettles, thinning out etc.

 

Thanks for that @Sheal, i never realised the lawn would root that far down. The edging strip is 150mm deep with only 100mm showing above the ground, would the roots be that far down already considering that i only seeded the edges about 2 months ago?

Cheers @Mowerman, i think i'll have to look into something like this because it's just making a mess of the nice clean edging that i put down The plan was to pebble/stone around the edge anyway so this might help in the long run to stop it growing this fast.

 

Pebbles are a solution but not one I'd go for because they somehow always tend to find their way onto the lawn. If you are set on using pebbles, make sure you put a decent membrane underneath to keep weeds locked down. If you plan to strim your edges horizontally, pebbles can be a problem as they fire all over the place and are obviously not good for your lawn mower. Bark chippings are a lot less harmul in this sense.

If you plan on using edging shears, there shouldn't be a problem. My only advice is don't use small pebbles if you have many cats near you as they use it as a litter tray and dig pebbles up onto your lawn. Seriously, cats (or their cr@p) is my no 1 foe when it comes to gardening.

On the upside, those white pebbles or plum slate do look very nice in a lot of gardens. Good luck with your choice.

 

Yes they are probably that far down already but I wouldn't think they are strong enough to spread horizontally yet.

 

@Sheal, i've been out pulling up the bigger clumps and laying down a weed membrane over the rest of the stragglers and there's now some lovely white pebbling over the top of them.

@Mowerman, thanks for the advice... i have put a membrane down and then covered this in some white pebbles (see picture). I use hand shears for the edge of the lawn and i use a manual cylinder mower for the rest of the grass so hopefully i should be able to keep the pebbles in place instead of spitting them all round the garden!

 

The membrane should do the trick Prkns, time will tell.

You've made a great job of the garden, I wish mine looked that neat and tidy.