Yes, the sides of our raised beds are made of lumber. Untreated lumber. Since we stay dry so much of the time, we only have to replace the boards about every 8-10 years.

My entire garden slopes. Our property is basically a creek hollow. The front veggie garden slopes downward from south to north and from west to east. Without raised beds all my soil would end up in the creek. Our house, detached garage, potting shed, greenhouse and chicken coops fill up most of the level ground, so every garden plot I have slopes, and every one of them is fenced with fencing 8' tall. Otherwise, all I'm doing is growing deer chow.

In the beginning the ground was so hard that it was hard to break up and improve it at all and the raised beds were just about 3-4" above grade in the garden. Now, some of them are 8" above grade and the new ones we built for potatoes and sweet potatoes this year are 3' tall so all the potatoes and other root crops would stay well above the hardware cloth at the bottom of the bed. We had to line them with 1/4" hardware cloth to exclude the voles. Although our approximately 10 acres of woodland always has had voles, they only have become a problem since 2011. I think they left the woods and came to the garden to eat in that horrible dry and hot summer of 2011 and they decided to stay. We would occasionally have one or two move upland to the grassland around the house and other buildings, but the cats took care of them. This has changed how I do things, and explains my comments in the other thread about how we are digging out raised beds and lining them with quarter inch hardware cloth to exclude the voles. I think that the bobcats used to help control any voles or field mice that temporarily came to the garden to eat because we always had bobcats in the garden back when it had only a 3' tall fence. Once we raised the fence to 8' tall to keep the deer out, the bobcats couldn't get into the garden to hunt rodents so that likely made the voles more comfortable about moving into the garden to stay.

I garden using many of the biointensive techniques advocated by John Jeavons in his classic book "How To Grow More Vegetables* (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) *Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine". A key tenet of his process for getting the largest harvest every year involves double-digging every bed every year, which I do not do and never will do. Initially, we had to work extremely hard to be able to dig down 3 or 4", and even after enriching that soil, the harder clay lay beneath. Every year, as the soil improved, we could dig deeper and deeper when amending beds. Around 2010, I dug a true double-dug type bed beginning at grade level. I was so thrilled to be able to dig down to the depth of two shovel-lengths. Technically, though, that bed was triple dug because of the above-grade raised bed. Before beginning to double dig that bed, I had shoveled all the soil from the raised bed portion of the bed into the pathways and into molasses feed tubs lined up on the adjacent bed. Then I double dug the grade-level portion and amended that soil. Then I dumped and shoveled the above-ground portion of that soil back into the bed, ending up with a triple-dug bed.

I grew up in a family with a farming/ranching history on both sides, although most of my relatives got out of farming and ranching after World War II. A couple of my uncles, and my grandfather, continued to ranch and farm well into the 1960s and 1970s, and a couple still were ranching in the 1980s. Many of my extended family members are lifelong gardeners, so I grew up around gardening, farming and ranching, and I am well aware of soil depletion issues. That's a good thing, because when we moved here, we found the most pitiful, tired, thin, worn-out soil imaginable. Luckily, I understood why it was that way and how to fix it. My dad worked hard to improve our black clay when I was a kid, so I knew that it was possible to turn clay into great soil....although I believe it is harder with our dense red clay than it was with our sticky black clay in Texas. That blackland clay was sticky and mucky but it never was as dense and compacted as the red clay we have now. At least, though, red clay is very high in minerals so once you improve its texture and structure, anything you plant in it does grow like crazy.

I am addicted to gardening, and it all starts with the soil, so to feed my garden addiction, I have become addicted to soil improvement as well.

Dawn

Was that black clay what they call "gumbo clay"? I hear this name a lot in gardening circles.