Walnuts: The squatters of the tree world

Since the arrival of Little C, it's polite to say that various things have fallen to the wayside.  Namely, weeding. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I love weeding as much as the next girl.  I love claring out a bed and having all my plants clear of invaders and interlopers.  Once things get out of hand, though, it is a daunting task that makes one want to bushog the entire flower bed and mulch the shit out of it and start over. 

I've been doing some side work that has taken up my naptime, and now that that project is finished, I have found I have oodles of time to devote to the flower beds.  If you've never had the honor of trying to pull a walnut sapling out of the ground then you're missing out.  It's as if these 2 foot tall wee little trees have a taproot that goes all the way to China.  It's a task that requires gloves, a pitchfork, a shovel, copious amounts of swearing and a massage from your husband when he gets home.  Imagine me in a full sweat, hair going every which way hacking at a poor walnut tree who, for all it is worth, is handing on to Mother Earth for all it is worth.  I stab it with a pitchfork like a fairy-tale peasant stabbing a warewolf.  I get a good chunk of root and I lean into the pitchfork trying to break the root free. 

*SNAP*  Not only do I break the pitchfork at the base of the fork, I break it at the handle, too.  Who does that?  Me, apparently.  I ceded defeat on this particular tree and went inside to spend the rest of the precious naptime figureing out a way to explain the pitchfork now in 3 pieces to Papa B.