I just keep adding organic material to the beds in the fall and winter (fruit and veg, leaves, sometimes horse manure.) If you have enough organic content in your soil it is sort of like it makes its own mulch and you don't need to put a special layer over it anyway.

Mulches can create the environment that slugs, and a number of other insect pests, like but it also creates an environment that could support many beneficial insects and predators. An article in the current issue of Fine Gardening magazine (October, 2015) under the Healthy Garden heading answers questions about fall cleanup in the garden and dispels many myths.

There is no good reason to remove mulches from a garden plot, ever, unless that mulch is made of materials that will contribute nothing worthwhile to the soil, ie. rubber, or stones. The mulches I have put on my planting beds have been digested by the Soil Food Web and have only added more material and have never removed any.

kimmq is kimmsr

One year I had slugs invasion, they ate rhubarbs, black currant leaves and other things. I applied anti-slug organic pellets from Home Depot against these creatures but nothing worked. Then I put coffee grounds about 1/2 inch thick around currant bush and rhubarbs. They finally stopped to attack my poor plants. My guess is the slugs don't like coffee grounds on their body. What if you put UCG over your mulch ?

How do all you No Dig gardeners handle mulch in the fall and winter?

We use Sluggo twice a year. Yes, it is organic.

Thanks for the replies everyone. It sounds like the best choice would be to leave the mulch on and find ways to deal with the pests.

The composted manure is worth considering as it acts as a mulch in itself. But, should I really want to keep my mulch, I'll look into coffee grounds and Sluggo.

Grubby: yep, my maple leaves have to be chopped or they form big thick mats that are hard to garden with and don't let water through.

I was able to get some garden beds to a point where I didn't till them. In fact, I laid board on the soil if I needed to get into the bed to plant or harvest. Weeds were not much of a problem by then. It took a few years to get to that point. The soil was clay and it became very fertile. The compost on the surface acted as a mulch.

Seems like no-till is the goal for garden beds.

I had a similar situation in early spring with a large population of slugs and pillworms. I had left the fallen leaves in several areas of the yard, thinking it would help that area later in the spring, or at least, break down over time.

Instead, I started spring with more slugs and pillworms than I had ever remembered. They certainly had a lot of shelter!

Though the funny part is that as spring and summer wears on, I cannot really see that much of all those loose leaves anymore. They went somewhere, whether that was wind blowing them away or getting eaten up as food by the spring insect population.

I definitely leave it in place. If I feel there is too much shelter for slugs/pill bugs in spring when I plant, I rake the mulch a little away from seeded areas and put little collars (made from rings cut from tp rolls) around seedlings. Once the seedlings are big enough to fend for themselves, the mulch can be added back.

I do what Elisa does.... Pulling away the leaf mulch for seedlings and seeded areas.... Plus it dries out the soil a bit more as well. I also try and get the sluggo out very early to get ahead of the population boom. And last by the time things are established I am applying a new layer of mulch closer to all the plants. The pill bugs and slugs never seem to cause too much of a problem through the remainder of the year.