Helen Atthowe on soil health

In this short excerpt from the Permaculture Design Course at Wheaton Labs, Helen Atthowe imparts the wisdom she has acquired through more than three decades of agricultural practice. She presents a series of six fundamental principles. These principles encompass enhancing the diversity of the soil's food web via varied crops, minimizing soil disturbance, sustaining continual growth throughout the year, preserving soil coverage, regularly incorporating organic residues, and ideally cultivating your local carbon source. Helen emphasizes that abiding by these guidelines is crucial for achieving effective and enduring soil management practices. See her here:  

I think the ideas that Helen has come up with are simple in theory, but I'm having a little difficulty on a garden scale in practise. I can manage the 'living root' bit (hey - less weeding!) but feeding with organic materials on the soil surface has proved a bit more tricky.
Helen uses a mower between her rows on her market garden - shooting the cut material into the rows to mulch them. I suspect that this isn't as easy as it sounds either! My problem is that I have multiple rows in my beds with different crops in almost every row. When they are seedlings I can't just broadcast over the top, or I risk smothering my baby plants.
In my climate I understand I need a more nitrogen rich surface mulch to kick start the soil biology as the temperature is very cool. I have some plants growing adjacent to the beds, but not really enough to cut for a good layer and people tell me that mulching like this will lead to a slug problem....
I'm interested if anyone is having success with mulching with plant matter between plant rows and how you go about it.

Nancy Reading wrote:people tell me that mulching like this will lead to a slug problem....

That's my worry too.  I've been putting physical barriers around my young plants & surface mulching outside the barriers, to reduce this.

Maybe we need to "stack in time" more, and mulch more over winter, early spring and later in the year, drawing back the mulch for young plants until they can stand up to slugs?

Since most (all?) of my vegetables are deciduous (probably not the right word, but you know what I mean!) the beds are pretty bare in winter and I do mulch heavily with seaweed/bracken/crop residues etc. then, as well as some of my own compost in spring as part of the bed preparation. It's mulching in the summer around the growing crops that is trickier to manage, but Helen implies is part of her toolset - feeding the soil microbes year round, especially when the plants are growing.
Maybe when decomposition is slower (cool summers) the winter mulching will last for longer, so summer mulching less needed? I think some mulch around the vegetables anyway is beneficial to give the slugs something else to munch on than my plants! Also reduces the weed seedlings a little - some are good as companion plants, but I wouldn't want them swamping out my vegetables.