Lol. I’ve mulched with leaves, and they blew all over the yard and had to be re-raked. I’ve mulched with lawn clippings, and pulled grass starts out of the beds for years after. I’ve mulched with hay, and fought hay starts for years after. Still pulling those. I’m open to suggestions (outside of cover crops, not going there).
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I used wood chip mulch to keep strawberries off the ground and reduce weeds. I’ve also used thick bats of straw (not hay, which is full of seeds).
Now, I don’t mulch because Voles move in and can devour crops. It’s easier for me to drag a hoe, while weeds are small, than it is to fight the rodents if the tunnels are unseen.
Good quality weed barrier is often easier to use. Dewitt even makes one with a whitish and black side, so you can reflect heat away from the soil, or use the black side up to warm the ground. handy stuff.
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I plant Dwarf Project Tomatoes and peppers in sub irrigation planters and use plastic “showercaps”, white side up in the summer in my Earthboxes and clay pebbles in my GroBuckets.
I plant potatoes in fabric bags and containers and hill up with chopped valley oak leaves.
Mostly we have been battling birds determined to do battle with our windows.
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Shower cap?
It’s a plastic mulch. White on one side black on the other.
That bird looks angry! 
We’ve had warm days but some really cool nights, and lots of wind. I haven’t taken my poor leggy seedlings outside yet. This weekend I’ll hopefully finally get this planted.
On the frustrating front, not one of my garlic did anything. I’ve been paying attention to making sure the excess water was draining after big rain storms (and we continue to get our fair share), and still not one sprout after the spring thaw. All the bulbs often start sprouting a bit as the fall begins its cool down so it’s not the bulbs, but once the freeze comes, I’ve only had the bulbs re-start once or twice and with that, they yield tiny garlic. I might need to give up on my dreams of garlic, or this planting of garlic in the fall just doesn’t work for me.
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where are you located? Do you add nitrogen to the soil (blood meal)?
I’m in New England. Have not tried nitrogen/blood meal, but I’ve used other general fertilizer/plant foods. When spring and thaw rolls around, when I get nothing I usually will find the bulbs withered or rotted away. I think the ‘transition’ (if you want to call it such) between snow and ice to slush and rain through much of April is pretty much non-existent, which I suspect is what contributes to the bulbs turning to mush.
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So irritating. I’m in the PNW too – but recently moved to a deer-free neighborhood. The eagles and hawks seem to balance out all the cute bunnies around here. We’ll see! I have a variety of mesh-y wire-y things to try to keep animals out of my bed + @bogman’s recipe for chili rodent repellent 
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I wish you the best of luck! We don’t have enough predators in our hood to keep the critters at bay. So a lot of things are fenced or netted, but not all. And they find a way to get in. We try to make each other feel better by saying they have more time and more need than we do, so in the end it will always be an uphill battle. But to be truthful, I don’t have the greenest thumb, so it’s not like I would have the victory garden if only it wasn’t critter kingdom here. I can admit that much!
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Yeah, we go from snow to 80 degrees to 30 degrees and then to mud season. Knocking on wood, our garlic has done well the past few years. We plant at the end of October, fertilize a couple of time with blood meal and should harvest mid-July. I think annual applications of leaf hummus have helped to loosen the soil quite a bit.
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I’ve been getting this type by the bag at my local hardware store – which thankfully sells it for less what’s shown on the link.
I’ve been on a mission to sheet mulch a bunch of extra-weedy spots in my yard and so far this is doing the trick with suppressing most weeds. Actually I think it brought some fungal spores along with it. Check out what I found on my lawn last week, just adjacent to some bark mulch I laid around my herb garden last fall:
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What, pray tell, is a deer free neighborhood? Our deer wander around in town like they live there.
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We have deer all over Washington, DC — not just the suburbs but in town as well Also lots of foxes to keep the rabbits thinned. The deer have no natural predators (other than SUVs) and they have to be culled every few years, and that creates a to-do.
Are you serious? I used to live in D.C. ( N.W. and N.E., but not M or V.) . I haven’t been in a few years, and even then it was changing quickly, but still hard to imagine.
Knocking on wood, but I don’t have a lot of veggie varmints in my yard. Deer near by, but for some reason not in my garden.
Are you growing hardneck or softneck varieties?
Generally hardneck. I find them zippier and better tasting. Scapes are just a plus.
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Ha! Scapes are basically the whole reason I grow garlic - I loooooooooove them. I was just thinking that if you were trying to grow softnecks, that might be part of the problem. Do you grow in raised beds? Drainage could be the issue.
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Yes, raised beds and I suspect drainage is the problem too. This year I ran out after nearly every rain to make sure the beds drained well (there’s a little spout that empties excess water). It may be that the design doesn’t work as well in reality. I’ve also bought short risers to put under the legs at one end so that the there is a slight tilt to the beds, which will encourage the water to flow towards the spout. I’m disheartened and not sure if I want to bother again.
The irony is that in my first year we put regular supermarket garlic in the ground in a not so great spot. While those didn’t really survive either, we must not have pulled the ‘bad’ cloves out completely and there are still random garlic sprouts every once in a while.
