The Trimmer That Tamed My Fence Line

There's a stretch of wire fence at the back of my lot, down past the slope, where the property line runs behind the willow oak. For three summers straight I lost that fence to crabgrass and broomsedge before I ever got around to admitting it. It wasn't laziness exactly. It was more that the front of the yard always won out, the raised beds and the boxwoods along the drive got the attention, and by the time I made it to the back fence in July the grass was already knee-high and tangled through the wire itself.

I'd been mowing around it with the push mower for years, which does nothing for grass that's grown up inside a fence line, wrapped around the bottom rail where a mower blade can't reach without me risking the wire or the blade. What finally changed things was a BLACK+DECKER string trimmer that Delia picked up one Saturday when she went to the hardware store for something else entirely. She set it in the shed and didn't say much about it, just mentioned she was tired of me talking about that fence like it was a job I was still planning to get to.

I'm 71, and I'll say plainly that I'd avoided trimmers for a while. The gas ones I'd used decades back were heavy, hard to start, and loud enough that I'd come inside with my ears ringing. This BLACK+DECKER is electric, corded, and light enough that I didn't feel it in my shoulder the way I expected to. The first time I plugged it in and walked it down to the fence, I honestly thought I'd be back inside for the extension cord within twenty minutes, tangled or stuck on something. That's not how it went.

The auto feed on the BLACK+DECKER is the part that surprised me most. With the old trimmers I remembered, you had to stop, bump the head against the ground, sometimes pull the string out by hand when it snarled. This one just kept feeding as I worked, and I made it the full length of the fence, maybe eighty feet, without stopping to fuss with the string once. The 14-inch cutting path meant I wasn't making three passes over the same patch of broomsedge either. Two, sometimes one, and the wire came clear.

I'd forgotten what that fence line was even supposed to look like until I saw it bare again for the first time in three summers.

Sawyer, who's nine now, wanted to help the first Saturday I brought the BLACK+DECKER out for real, and his job was managing the extension cord so it didn't loop back under my feet or catch on a fence post. He took that seriously, walking it out behind me a section at a time, and it turned into the kind of morning where the work got done and nobody minded that it took a little longer because of it.

The trimmer swivels over to edge too, which I hadn't planned on using much but ended up liking along the drive where the grass creeps over the concrete every few weeks. It's not a separate tool, just the same head turned on its side, and it saved me from digging the old hand edger out of the shed at all this year. On the slope out back, where I'm often standing at an angle instead of square to the ground, the trimmer stayed light enough in my hand that I didn't feel like I was fighting it to keep the cutting head level.

I've had the BLACK+DECKER through three seasons now, the fence line, the drive, a stretch along the shed where the mower never quite reaches the corner. The cord is the one thing you have to plan around, since it's electric and not battery, and on a half-acre lot that means running an extension cord farther than I'd like some days. I keep two hundred feet of cord coiled on a hook next to it now, right where I hang the trimmer itself on the pegboard wall.

I wrote up the longer account of three seasons with this BLACK+DECKER trimmer if you want the week-by-week version, cord management and all the small things I noticed along the way. And if you'd rather skip straight to why I'd buy it again, I put together ten reasons this trimmer has earned its spot in the shed.

Delia noticed the fence before I said a word about it, same as she notices most things around here. She mentioned it in passing one evening, that she could actually see the wire again on her walk down past the neighbor's, and I told her that was the whole point, though I hadn't expected it to matter to anyone but me.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you've got a fence line or a corner of the yard the mower keeps losing to, I wouldn't wait three summers the way I did. It's not about needing a bigger tool or a stronger back. It's about having something light enough that you'll actually carry it back there instead of finding a reason to put it off again. The BLACK+DECKER is the one that got me back to that fence, and it's the one I still reach for first when the grass starts creeping over the wire.