Whipper Snipping
Pascoe Vale
Using a whipper snipper or line trimmer to trim tackle your lawn edges!
Pascoe Vale Lawn and Garden staff are lawn edging professionals and can have your lawns and nature strip looking brand new if they haven’t been touched in a while. We also offer a weekly maintenance edging service for those of you that really like to have your lawns looking mint.
When it comes to edging, we typically use a Ryobi 25.4cc Curved Shaft Line Trimmer, with some type of light diamond line, which tends to suffice for most tasks and is particularly good for doing the weekly maintenance of that edging. However, if you're cutting a new edge, we recommend you using a blade edger, which we can swap out if your lawns need a new edge cut.
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Line Trimming!
We recommend doing all your flat trimming first and with this type of trimming you're going to be walking backwards, with the debris going away from you. After many years of line trimming, we have found keeping the trimmer head completely straight and looking at the edge that you're wanting to cut, is the first step to great edging.
As you walk backwards, be sure not to lose concentration for a minute. It's very easy to then go off course and wrecker edge so you want to maintain concentration on the edge as you're cutting it.
The other thing is keeping your RPM up on it if you're happy RPM really low the string tends to start to wobble, and you get a wider edge of messier looking as keeping the RPM up keeps that string straight and just gives you a much cleaner looking edge.
It’s important to take note of how you're holding the line trimmer. Holding it almost like a 3-point hold, keep it nice and tight when you're edging. Flip the machine upside down, put your hand on the handle, finger on the trigger and rest the back of the engine against your elbow. Using this technique will help you keep the head completely straight.

Whipper Snipping!
Although it really comes down preference and circumstances, we typically prefer to do the edge from the concrete side, but in some cases, if a vehicle is parked on a driveway, you may have to do it from the grass edge. We find that it’s a lot easier visually, to trim from the concrete side.
Very briefly, that's how to maintain a nature strip or any part of your lawn edge with a regular line trimmer. So, here are the key takeaways to remember when you are undertaking the lawn edging with a line trimmer:
- keep your RPM up to keep that line straight.
- concentrate and always be looking straight at the edge that you want to maintain.
- use that three-point hold where you're holding the handle with one hand holding the trigger and the other handles and controlling the trigger with your thumb and then resting the engine putting some pressure there using your elbow to keep that three point that stops the machine from moving around and really helps you guide that straight edge.