It's a Catch-22, if you keep the soil moist with a mulch, the plants will love it but so will the earthworms and slugs. Earthworms are good and slugs are bad so you get the good with the bad.
If you don't mulch you get hot, dry soil and weeds. Earthworms will burrow deeper to be where the woil is moist and they will not benefit your soil as much in the plant's root zone.
I love spike's cartoon but I hate weeding so I use mulch and then I use organic slug bait around my cabbage plants. The slugs really don't bother much of anything else in my garden, not even the lettuce. Maybe because I have so much mulch everywhere, they are happy eating the straw. I don't know.
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