The vegetable forum might give you better advice since many members use raised beds. The main thing to remember is that the beds should be no wider than you can easily reach to the middle of. Also, while you may prefer raised beds for a variety of reasons, they are a lot of work to make, and many gardeners start with dreadful soil that they build up through lasagna gardening techniques and/or cover crops.

Thanks for the pictures. You will certainly need to use every conceivable water saving method, that much is clear. The area of your future house looks very dry indeed. The closest experience I have is gardening in central florida where although there is no shortage of water as a yearly average, there is a quite dry season during the cooler part of the year, the sky is very clear so the sun is bright and hot and the sandy "soil" dries out very dry. There is a also a lot of drying wind that is very hard on food plants and young fruit trees. I suspect there will be several critical factors for you, presuming that the main issue, water, is available. Windbreaks will be super important, and the easiest thing would be to build the house with walls that enclose a sheltered garden. Second, you likely have far too much sun for most annual food crops, so if that sheltered area can have shade from about 1 or 2 in the afternoon might help a lot. With such clear sky and high sun there the morning will probably be enough. In extreme environments the majority of the heat stress on a plant that is not well-adapted will be from the west. Equally important will be crop choices, and that is where it's especially unlikely anyone on this forum will be able to give good info. As mentioned earlier, there must be people in the region who will know everything. We all know of some dry hot climate tree crops: notably date palm and almond, maybe pomegranate, because they are popular foods in the west, but I am pretty sure that there are a number of leguminious trees as well that will grow in those conditions. There must also be some annual type and maybe perennial type greens and other vegetables. I would think it logical that any of the common food crops that originated in the damper and/or cooler climates (which is most, by far) will be a waste of your time and resources.

Crystalshoe- Hydrology, not the size of the bed or container, determines whether you're growing in a raised bed (RB) or a container, and by extension, what type of soil you can/should use. A planting of daisies in a plastic or clay pot resting on your deck or patio is a container planting. Bury that pot an inch or two into the ground so there is continuity between the medium in the pot and the soil the pot is partially buried in, and it becomes a RB - no matter what size the pot is. The difference is, the earth will act as a giant wick, and remove water that would normally perch in a conventional container planting, but water movement within the partially buried container would closely mimic water movement in the earth or in the soil below. There is a caveat, however. The area where the pot is buried or partially buried would need to drain properly for things to work. If you were to bury the pot in clay soil that allowed essentially no percolation, the pot would simply fill up with water at every rainfall or irrigating. If you're building a RB over a clay soil that drains poorly - don't amend the clay unless you can drain the area. If you do, water will percolate or run into the area you amended, leaving it saturated for extended periods (the bathtub effect). You can remedy this problem if you are able to cut trenches or use a French drain cut into the clay to drain excess water to a lower area away from where you're growing. Not amending the clay below your beds also allows any excess water in the RB soil to move laterally over the surface of the clay where it can evaporate. If you amend, the water won't move laterally until the amended depression is entirely saturated with water. No matter how you look at it, you're eventually going to have problems with a RB over clay unless you can figure a way to use gravity or a pump to move water from the area. As soil life moves through the clay and increases the OM content of the clay below the RBs, that soil will become more porous than the surrounding clay. The pores will quickly fill with water when it rains or when you irrigate unless you have a plan to remove the water. The end game is, the water that collects below your RBs has to have a place to go. It has to drain naturally in a reasonable time, or be directed downhill or to a sump where it can be mechanically removed. Amending the soil beneath RBs just forces you to face the brunt of the problem sooner (in heavy clay soils). BTW - you don't need to use a highly aerated soil like that you referred to in your OP in RBs. In fact, the highly aerated soils that perform so well in containers are probably not a particularly good choice for RBs because they have a steep water retention curve that will have you watering more than you'd prefer. Keep in mind that the time you spend now, properly preparing, will save a lot of time and frustration later. How many beds? Size/depth? Budget constraints high, low, medium? Ready access to materials you think might work? Al

We have a couple of raised beds with strawberries. By June, it's too hot for them. We stick pvc hoops over the bed & tie up some shade cloth. The plants perk right back up. I've noticed that our local nurseries keep even full sun natives under shade cloth--of course these are container plants, but still, it must benefit them even though those plants are watered daily. We also pick up lots of bagged oak leaves in May & mulch heavily.