Yes, these will provide great mulch for strawberries. These materials also provide great housing for voles, which will eat the roots out from under your plants. We have already gone out in spring wondering why plants are not growing, why they turned brown. A gentle tug revealed no roots. In their place, vole tunnels. But perhaps you don't have voles around your place. I hope not. Ted

I've got my strawberries planted in black plastic. Underneath the plastic, I've got soaker hoses. I feel the dirt down around the roots to see when water is needed. Even though I am in the desert, water is not needed very often. The black plastic heats the soil early in the year when heat is needed. Then the plants grow tall and thick and shade the plastic so that it is no longer adding additional heat to the soil. A big benefit is that the fruit is kept off the soil and does not rot if it is touching the ground.

For slugs, I think it really depends on how clean your patch/fields are. I don't think the plastic has any special effect other than it is clean. The question that follows is, "how clean are the aisles or sides of your outer rows?" You want to keep organic matter away from the plants and keep moisture down. In that regard a littler more spacing helps with air circulation.

Seems to me that wood should be one of the sources of organic matter that is applied to soil. Wood is partly made of long-lasting organic molecules (lignins) that serve as food for mycorrhizal fungi. I add wood chips to my compost piles when I can, and I almost always can. How well wood chips works as a mulch and soil amendment depends upon a lot of factors. What kinds of trees were the source of the chips? How small are the chips? How much leaf and small twig is in the waste? How fresh are the chips? What is the climate where they will be used? Does the soil beneath the wood chips have lots of organic matter in it already, and what kind of OM is in the soil (decomposed wood, fresh compost, aged compost?) From what I read here, it seems like wood chips work well in hot, humid environments, almost regardless of other factors. They also seem to work well when their use is ongoing, where there has been wood mulch in place for years. Fresh, small wood chips that contains lots of twigs and fresh leaves composts very hot and seems like an ideal mulch to suppress weeds. Just like compost piles, fresh chips benefit from being in a pile where the vapors, both water and ammonia, can be reabsorbed by the pile. I'd even suggest covering the pile while it is at its hottest. Covering the pile will slow the loss of water and ammonia and speed its decomposition. I'm thinking of a four-layer method of creating new garden beds. Starting in the fall, on the bare soil, apply some of the humic shale ore like Zamzow's Huma Green. Maybe scratch it into the very top of the soil. Then lay on four inches of finished compost. Then several inches of unfinished compost, and finally a mulch of wood chips that have had a chance to decompose for a bit. I think there would be a good interaction between the unfinished compost and the wood chips. By spring the finished compost will be integrated with the topsoil, and the layers above might be a perfect mulch. Dig through it to plant your plants, perhaps keeping it away from the plant stems until the plants are established and the weather warms up. The wood chips will protect the layers underneath and eventually become part of the compost.