Is painting a lawn/garden border a good idea?

Question

My lawn goes up to my garden bed with a concrete border between. I looks something like this.

But the plain concrete looks ... bad, just bad. I'm thinking about slapping a coat of paint on it, maybe a nice grey or brown colour.

The thing is, I often mow over it and use a mechanical edger. I think I would scratch up the paint. I don't know if scratched up paint work would look worse than unpainted concrete.

My questions are:

• Will it get all scratched up if I mow and edge up to it?

  • If it does, will it look bad?

• Does anyone have painted concrete garden borders?

  • How do they look when you mow over them?

Answer 1

Yes, paint will get beat up and you'll likely end up in a never ending cycle of repainting.

Instead, I'd look into using an concrete acid stain. These are the stains that people use on concrete floors and concrete counter tops and the like.

Note that there are two types of stains...true acid stains, that will etch into the concrete, and then there's the stains that you can find at Home Depot that act more like a wood stain in that it's just a top coat. Go with the former.

I've used the Kemiko products before for staining a basement concrete floor:

http://www.kemikostainforconcrete.com/

There are several other brands of concrete stain to choose from as well.