Inexpensive Landscape Borders: Ideas and Tips

by Reader Contributors

Learn how to create inexpensive landscape borders and edging that don’t require a lot of work. Many of these ideas use repurposed items that you can easily obtain for little or no cost to create beautiful yet unique landscape and garden borders.

Dear Dollar Stretcher,
Does anyone have any suggestions for an inexpensive landscape border? We want to turn the side and front of our house into a semi-raised bed for various herbs, but we have found the cost of ready-made materials obscene. And we just don’t have a couple hundred dollars to drop on just the landscaping materials. Can you help?
LSN in Baton Rouge, LA

Ideas for Inexpensive Landscape Borders

So many of our frugal readers are pros at landscaping and gardening on a small budget, so we reached out and asked for their best tips and ideas for inexpensive landscape borders and easy-to-do landscape edging. Read on for their frugal suggestions. You’re sure to find an affordable solution or two for your own yard.

Concrete for Landscape Border

Here in CA, many people are using “old” concrete. They stack them like bricks to create any height desired. Just break it up into the size you need with a sledgehammer. Once stacked (no mortar necessary), you can plant draping plants at the edge so they cover the rustic look of the concrete if you prefer.

The place to get the concrete is at your local waste dump. With the landfills trying to cut back on how much garbage is dumped every day, they will charge you very little, if anything. Also, keep your eyes peeled for anyone re-doing their driveway in your neighborhood. They’ll gladly give you the concrete.
Al in Marina, CA

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Rock Landscaping Borders

Just this past weekend, I took the whole family rock-hunting for our garden border. There are several new neighborhoods going up in our area. This usually involves the builder digging up the land and then raking it flat, which brings up a lot of nice-sized rocks. Most builders are happy when you remove these rocks, as they don’t have to haul them away.

The kids really enjoyed hunting for just the right-sized rocks and even helping to dig some larger ones out of the dirt. Now my garden has an attractive border for free and just a little work.
Barbie from Indiana

Stories of Landscaping Borders

To find cheap landscaping borders, walk in the woods or along country roads, and you’ll find all sorts of rocks, pieces of concrete, interesting logs, etc. I collected about 50 feet of border this way. I also added some large shells that I already had. Makes for an interesting edging when you relate the stories about where you collected your gems! Friends and neighbors can also be on the lookout for you and pick up a rock here or there in their travels.
Cathy

Landscape Borders from Quarry

Try a local quarry. The place from which I just moved had a granite quarry, and the small leftover pieces were placed in a scrap pile. You could take as much as you wanted (and could haul).
DM

Recycled Tire Landscape Edging

Try using tires as your edging. Paul Farber is the author of a book called Tire Recycling is Fun and one of his ideas is to cut the sidewalls off of a used tire and then cut across the tread. This gives you a two to three-foot piece of edging that can define your border. Depending on the tire size, they can be up to 6″ high, and they are indestructible.

They don’t rot, dogs don’t chew on them, and you can get them free almost anywhere. You just need to be careful of the wires if you cut a steel-belted tire because they are sharp!
Jonathan in NM

Landscape Ties

Our local railroad office gives away the discarded crossties as they replace them, although they are very heavy to move. As a “thank you,” we take the railroad yard crew some canned soft drinks or other snacks.
MC

No Border is the Best Border

Sometimes, no border is the best border of all!

Dig a 6-8″ trench around the area that you want to make into a bed. Use a square-edged shovel or edger tool to get a nice clean line. Next, mound the topsoil from where you want the highest point of the bed to be and slope it down to where the trench starts. Now, after planting your herbs, use pine straw for mulch and cover the bed, including the trench.

This has a nice professional appearance and only requires re-edging a couple of times a year. Just push back the pine straw, and using the square shovel, remove any rogue grass growth and redistribute the dirt that will naturally settle with rain/watering. Then, tuck the pine straw back in!
Teresa M. in Montgomery, Al

Creative Recycled Borders

We had a good chuckle at our neighbor’s choice of landscaping borders, but it actually looks nice and it’s free. He used his old rain gutters. He turned them upside down and buried the edges.
Susan

Ask for Borders Help

When we bought our first house, we were cash-poor, as many new homeowners are, so anything we did had to be free or practically so. My husband works at a sheet metal factory where many materials arrive on wooden pallets or are braced by 4x4s. He would take our truck to the plant on a Saturday and load it up with free wood! Pallets were used to make our compost enclosure and torn apart for shelves for the garage. He notched the 4x4s like Lincoln Logs just by using a circle saw and built many raised beds for both flowers and vegetables. Those beds lasted for 10 years! Nothing was chemically treated, so it didn’t hurt the soil or the plants. All it took was some work. Check at local factories. You may be able to haul away a lot of freebies.

You can also make a raised bed by mounding the soil and planting in it. To keep the edges clean, you can use layers of newspaper around the edges of the bed, and plant trailing plants around the edges to cover the paper. You also can obtain free mulch in many communities. Usually, you do the work, but the mulch is free. I have also had tree services dump a load of chips in my yard after they have chipped up a neighbor’s tree. I just let them sit a year before I use them, so they don’t rob the soil of nitrogen as they decompose.

You should also let friends and neighbors know that you are building flowerbeds. Often, they have plants that they need to divide, and you can get most of your plants for free! Or divide plants that are already in your yard. I spent $10 on one hosta the first year in this house, and I have divided and divided that plant over and over again. I now have a whole garden full of beautiful plants.

So, you can have wonderful gardens and raised beds, just for the work and the asking!
Sue

Cut Log Landscape Edging

For inexpensive borders along your garden beds, use cut logs. You can obtain these for free from arborists and landscape companies or by looking around in your neighborhood. Select large or smaller logs, depending on the length or depth of the bed.
Kim from Nashville

Reviewed October 2023

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