In both years, the water storage varied with the soil depth, mulching areas and ridge-furrow shapes. In the top 20 cm layer, soil water storage during the early growing period was always greater in full mulching than in the other mulching treatments and CK (P < 0.05), but the difference disappeared after branch initiation stage ( Fig. 3A and E). In the subsoil layers (21–60 cm depth), the difference became smaller ( Fig. 3B and F), and disappeared in the deep (61–100 cm and 101–180 cm) soil layers ( Fig. 3 and Fig. 4).