All hail the mulch

Have I raved enough about mulch yet?  After not setting foot in my garden for four weeks (ahem), I can walk a lap around it and pull every blade of grass in about 15 minutes.  Which is lucky because that's about how long you can survive the mosquitoes.Can almost keep your feet moving. Hands up non mulchers who can weed any 4-week neglected garden that fast.  Even the weeds grow in the controlled rows.  I think they're trying to hide.  (Grass):  "I'm an onion!  No, really!"The garden is interesting.  In a complete inversion of last year, almost everything that thrived last year is failing this year and vice versa.  The peas are flourishing, (although they get poor effort grades at climbing and prefer to sprawl out away from their lattices), as are the new strawberries, and onions, which completely failed last year.We had a remarkable hail event a bit ago.  A torrential downpour of chickpea sized hail one afternoon, that covered the ground in white ice.  It was thunderously loud and powerful, an amazing thing, in June.  That broke a lot of stalks and bent all the onions, but nothing was completely destroyed.The tomatoes are not thriving, but doing ok, and I planted enough of them, so there should be plenty of tomatoes in time.  Peppers, great, spinach, lettuce, and kale mostly good, while the squashes are hit and miss and the watermelon plants have gotten smaller.  Still alive, but if they shrink any more they'll cease to exist.The beans were doing so well, but now only the scarlet runners are still there, not looking very motivated to run, and some of their leaves are lacy.  There is some kind of infestation that's new and bean-specific.  I'm going to assume slugs for now until I learn more. Unless the Ravens bit all the tops off my beans?