So satisfying, and so simple

Nobody enjoys weeding, do they? Actually, I've realized that I do. I really enjoy weeding, or should I say "de-weeding" my garden.

Returning a messy, plant-jammed bed to the state that it was intended to have is so satisfying for me, and it only takes a few minutes (I'll break a bed up into small sections and stop when I finish a section if I'm bored).

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I'll break this bed into three different sections. Five minutes of work turns the above into this:

The forms of individual plants can be seen, and everything just looks cleaner. I don't like the look of a bed that contains plants surrounded by big "dead space" of mulch.  I prefer having plants jam up against each other usually, but too crowded with too many different plants (desirable plants or non-desirables) crammed together is not good for my eyes or for the health of the plants.

I definitely hate the thought of weeding though. Most of my weeding work takes place spontaneously.

I'll be walking past and for whatever reason I decide that I must get rid of the weeds, even though I've walked past this same bed a dozen times already today.

(Man, that bed was jammed with weeds!)

Most of my weeding is done by hand too. I don't often use hoes or special weed-removal tools. I'll use a slim trowel once in a while, especially for dandelions. Crabgrass is quite difficult to remove once it reaches a certain size, so I'll need a trowel for that. This bed above had a lot of crabgrass in it.

I hate weeding in the hot sun though. I'd much prefer morning or evening (when mosquitoes are most prevalent unfortunately), but will spend a couple of minutes in the noonday sun when needed. Luckily the back of this bed is in shade:

So it's easy to spend extra time here where it's nice and cool. Still only took 10 minutes at most for this section.

I think it probably makes a difference in that these beds were really in need of weeding. If there were just a few small weeds here and there it wouldn't even be worth mentioning. Am I the only one who lets weeds get this bad before doing something?

One last example -- the bald cypress near my Pleioblastus viridistriatus bamboo patch:

That would have taken me 5 minutes at most with the right tool -- for instance my scuffle hoe.

The problem is that Super-whitey is currently locked up in the garage because shes... let's say "eager to have more kittens" right now, and it's too hard to watch her when she's out in the yard trying to attract Whitey's attention. So to get my scuffle hoe I'd have walk back to the house, up the deck, into the house, into the garage, get the hoe, bring it back through the house, back out into the yard -- and that just seemed like too much effort.

So I instead spent 20 minutes pulling these weeds by hand instead of 2 minutes with the hoe. Yeah, that was much easier.

Anyway, I still like weeding -- in small doses. It's a few minutes of work for a big visual impact, and those are the kinds of garden tasks I like most.