Mulching with what you've got
In a perfect world, I'd mulch
my vegetable garden with straw and my woody perennials with well
composted wood chips (or maybe leaves). If I needed to lay down a
kill mulch, I'd use corrugated cardboard as the kill layer. (Weekend
Homesteader: July gives the science behind these choices, but the
short version is --- it just makes the plants happy.)
But we don't live in a
perfect world. Even though I'd been carrying in cardboard from
the parking area for a week, I managed to use up every lick of the
delicious kill mulch 
material in one busy
Tuesday. Plus, I'd already mulched with the leaves my mother
snagged on her city curb and didn't want to spend all afternoon raking
more out of the woods.
(The piles of
wood chips at our
parking area are mellowing very nicely, but no way am I carrying that
heavy organic matter in by hand.)
So, having run out of my
favorite mulches, I used...whatever. Wednesday found me laying
down kill mulches alongside the black raspberries
with junk mail and then topping it all off with straw. Yes, I've
had mixed
results with paper
in the past, but I figure woody 
perennials
can handle the high carbon material better than a vegetable garden
could, and I also carefully pulled out all the slick pages (although I
left some colored newsprint in). I figure the high nitrogen straw
will help counteract the high carbon kill mulch (and will add nitrogen
to the soil this summer as the straw rots, making up for the fact that
I skimped a bit on manure --- we're running out of that too).
On the plus side, many
gardeners believe that it's a good idea to change your mulch and
compost source every year so your garden never gets overloaded (or
deficient) in one nutrient. So maybe I should be telling you I
thought all this through and decided a year under straw would make the
soil in our berry patch more well-rounded? Naw --- that's too
much like bright
yellow boots.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Mulch is heavy when you are raking it up in the woods during winter. The leaves and debri have so much moisture that it is hard to carry, even in a sheet. Ha! Ha!
But all my plants love it!