BTW it has tomatoes, peppers, a few herbs, and green beans

ALWAYS mulch. If it weren't for mulch, all my plants would be dead if I didn't water every day. I actually mulch with leaf compost. Several inches. I keep adding more as the summer goes by. I suppose straw would work. DO NOT confuse straw and hay. They are not the same. Hay is full of seeds=weeds.

As to shade cloth, it really depends what you're growing. Using shade cloth to reduce evaporation is the wrong reason. The reason to use shade cloth is to protect veggies that are barely summer veggies. I shade my Swiss Chard in the summer, or else they would end up in a wilted pile in the heat. Tomatoes? Maybe a little. Melons and squash? No no no.

I'm doing my first vegetable garden this year and am using wood chips/mulch. I would recommend using arborist wood chips, you can find them for free most of the time on Craigslist etc.

It helps keep the moisture in and weeds down (helps a lot with this) plus when they breakdown your dirt will be amazing next year!

Actually, a wood based or wood chip mulch would be at the bottom of my list :-) Most veggies/edibles are annual, shallowly rooted plants and the wood chips can impact their ability to access nutrients. There is a shallow layer at the soil surface and slightly below that will be devoid of N until these wood pieces decompose. It is not an issue with more permanent and deeply rooted plants but with new veggie starts or any annual edibles it can certainly affect growth. Straw, leaves, dry grass clippings, even compost are better choices but avoid the wood or bark products.

I've read they only deprive soil of nitrogen if you mix them in not if they sit on top of the soil.

But if that's true then all my plants probably wont do so well cause I have it all over my garden :/

That's not entirely true. :-) There is still an issue of wood chips tying up N at the soil surface or slightly below. While that is NOT a concern with more deeply rooted, permanent landscape plantings, it can have a very negative effect on very shallowly rooted annuals and edibles. There has been a great deal of study and documentation of this online if you care to do the research. If you have the wood chips and want to use them, then I'd suggest sandwiching in a layer of compost or composted manure between the soil and the chips.

"Before selecting a landscape mulch
material, it’s important to reflect
on the purpose of the landscape in
question. For instance, production
agriculture generally requires short
term, intensive management of a crop,
while the philosophy behind landscape
horticulture is the long term, sustainable
management of a system. Therefore,
those mulches that work best for crop
production (including vegetable gardens)
are often not the best choices for woody
ornamental landscapes, and vice versa."

Numerous previous and detailed discussions here about mulch the search will pull up. Also many over on the Soil, Compost & Mulches forum here.

Straw and hay ARE mulch - straw considered the ideal by many - and either much preferred over any bagged store bought "mulches".

As already mentioned, wood chip mulches are at the bottom of the list for a number of reasons. If one must use wood chips for some reason then additional sources of nitrogen in some form are often also needed.

Dave

That's true that wood chips deprive the (deep) soil of nitrogen when you mix them in, for long periods of time. But what are you going to do at the end of the season? Scrape them off? Everything else you can just dig in. Finely shredded wood, on the other hand, is probably OK. That will decompose underground pretty quickly. I use chips to mulch perennials, in beds that you don't dig up every year.

Cedar repels some insects, but it's never been obvious to me that it repels insects that are garden pests. Cockroaches? Yes. Termites? Yes. Ants? Yes.