You could try tilling in some sand and/or perlite to make the soil drain a little better.

Wherever you have exposed earth, mulch is beneficial. It helps resist new weeds (but not kill existing ones.) If your plantings are thick and, more or less, cover the ground, then adding mulch is not necessary.

I take care of a property that is zero percent lawn and 100 percent bed. As you can imagine, if there were a lot of weeds infesting the beds, it would take an entire team people to do weeding and it would probably be continuous. At the beginning, there was a period of time where it felt like that was the direction I was heading. I could pull a 5-gallon bucket of weeds every week. Now, I can barely find a pint of weeds in month. What made the difference is Preen, a granular, pre-emergent herbicide. Even though I am not averse to using herbicides properly, I want to use as little as possible. The beginning of a new planting is always the worst because there is lots of disturbed soil and a plethora of weed seeds that have been gathering for years. Preen will take care of a lot of these, and over time, since weeds are not going to seed, there will be fewer to be fought. In my experience, the first application of Preen has you wondering if it's working, so there is still a fair amount of hand weeding. But after the second application, there is a noticeable drop on new sprouts. Over a couple of years, I've noticed that some weeds which were prolific at the beginning, are now non-existent. I'm still following the schedule, but anticipate, over time, as whatever scars exist in the planting heal over with growth, that weeds will become virtually non-existent and I can use less Preen. I've also noticed in the early years, that if the schedule is missed -- like I'm a couple months late in applying it (and there are still a lot of disturbed areas) -- the weeds start festering up again. Now, I enter the schedule into my phone so the application date never gets forgotten about. It's working like a charm.

If you decide to try it. depending on how much beds space you have, you might want to consider buying it in the large size, as it is a lot cheaper. The small size is maybe about like a 1/2 gallon, for almost $20. The large size is in the vicinity of 4 gallons or so for about $30 or a little more. I've only found the large at Home Depot.

I added some sand to the hole for the hostas. I can’t weed much because we’ve had so much rain. Though I will try and pull while the soil is soft. I have used preen, but wasn’t sure how well it was working. I think I just need a better schedule.

Thank you Yardvaark for a very useful easy to apply and succinct post. Answers the question -Why? Why? Why more weeds? ...especially after using a loop hand hoe.