What works for me is dried like hay grass clippings of my lawn, which has nothing applied to it. When I cut, by making windrows, switching direction each pass. I adjust my cutting depth to not make too much, depends on how long since the last cutting and how much I want. Also, it dries faster. I then collect the dry clippings in a lawn sweep and pile near the garden. I spread it on thick.
For me, I need it right when I transplant into the garden, after tillage, I lay planks out, so I don't compact the soil as much with my feet, I plant, then I mulch it with the dry grass clippings. This covers the soil, it helps hold the moisture in this soil of loam/clay and organic matter and I get minimal, if any weeds. Once those plants grow, they shade out the area around them. Drying the clippings makes it easier to handle for mulching and is so much less weight on the lawn sweeper.
I prefer it as green as possible, like a good hay crop, it's loaded with nitrogen and a thick layer of it will grow some nice corn once that rain washes through it, kind of like a tea, all that goes into the soil. Putting it down when I plant, the weeds never get a chance to grow. I've actually packed some garbage cans with a bunch of this for this season, I kept it inside, I also dried it down inside on a tarp before storing it, loosely spread and fluffed up by hand with a fork, then packed it.
One year, I piled a bunch at the end of a sorry looking row of corn in poor soil in a section of my large garden patch. Those plants were the darkest olive drab green stalks I had, and they all had multiple ears. I don't seem to get any weed seed doing this. I have also used 2nd cut hay from the previous season. Do beware that you don't want excess nitrogen, that'll get you good green growth, but you may lack flowering. Never been a problem for me yet, with corn, tomatoes, bell peppers, maybe, same with eggplant, as they like the same things in the soil. I like it because I can walk away from the garden after planting and just worry about watering if it gets dry. Only place weeds have popped up are near the plants themselves, in that little space in between the plant stalk and the edge of the mulch.
The below was a couple years back, the plants were a bit crowded, should have spread them out more, but everything produced like crazy, one of the best I've ever had actually. This year I will cage my tomatoes with my own cages made from fencing fabric, they become a bit of a mess when crammed in. All of this was mulched with my lawn grasses, only fertilizer was dried blood and bone meal that was tilled in. I thought the results were pretty good. I had a pumpkin vine in with cucumbers by mistake and you know that vine went crazy, across the corn and hung basketball size pumpkins off the corn and the fence around the garden, will never forget that.
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