Now that the leaves are cleaned out of our flower beds, it's time to get ready for sprucing them up.

One of my favorite gardening tasks is edging. For one thing, it's good exercise. For another, there's immediate gratification for a job well-done. Plus, while my husband is like the Hulk by strength comparison to me, edging is a job I can do better than him (we'll keep that to ourselves).

My method is pretty simple and probably very rudimentary, but it works. I use a round-tip shovel and work my way from one end of the bed to the other digging out the edge between the grass and the bed itself. I dig at a slight angle so that the bed meets the grass side at a slope, like at the beach. That way, when we lay in the mulch, the slope helps keep it in place.

I normally do a hard edge about every other year, in the fall, because it gives me a good excuse to clear out all of the underbrush and loose plant matter that collects at the base of shrubs and such. Sort of like a spring cleaning folks do in their houses ... only in the fall. Uh, outside.

• Do you edge your garden beds?
• How often do you do it?
• What's your best method of edging?