My technique for making new vegetable garden beds has evolved to this; I'm working from a lawn with some pretty healthy grass growing, so I start by digging up chunks of the sod and scalping the sod from the clay soil with a machete. That leaves me with clay soil in large chunks. Once I've cleared enough area, I clear off the chunks of clay soil from one end and loosen the subsoil with a broadfork. I am careful not to turn the subsoil, just loosen it. I'll toss some humic acid on the top of the subsoil as I work across the bed. When the subsoil have been loosened, and the clay chunks are sitting on top, I'll level the surface as best I can. That's when I start to amend the soil. I use humic acid and organic lawn food and mix that into the top 2" of soil. Then I'll put on 3-4" finished compost, then 3" unfinished compost, then a mulch. Lately I've been using wheat straw covered with fresh grass clippings. I did this last fall to extend an existing garden bed. The soil looks terrific and the tomato plants look great this year. I'll add some of my home made compost and/or bulk compost from the nursery this fall.

If they are Yellow Jackets, it can be a safety issue as they can be aggressive defending their nest. I had a similar problem a couple of years ago. I couldn't go anywhere near the raised bed, so I had to use chemicals. The raised bed was built with old RR ties and they were deep in the rotted areas. If you can see where the entrance is(there may be more than one), get a can of pesticide that shoots a long stream, go out at dusk(or later)when they're not active, stay a safe distance away and shoot as much into the hole as you can, then retreat quickly. Dress covered from head to toe just in case. It may take a few days for the nest to die, but over time you will see less and less activity around the entrance. I know it sucks to have to do this, but you and yours need to be safe in your garden. I accidentally stepped on a Yellow Jacket nest once, and a swarm of them chased me for a block, and yes, I got stung. Whatever you decide to do, be safe! If need be call in pest control to take care of it for you. You can also check out the pests forum for threads on bees/hornets/wasp nests. HTH Here is a link that might be useful: garden clinic

I used to bend over backwards "amending" my heavy clay soils, using cover crops, double-digging - the whole 9 yards. Until one year I dug into the ground and found the cover crop I had planted last year perfectly preserved between the layers of cold, gray clay where I had dug it in the year before. So I went with mulching - because a few years before that, I had a plot in a community garden where we had access to a gigantic pile of hay. I mulched to a depth of over 12" - AFTER the hay had settled - it was the middle of a drought that year and I had the best garden I had ever had, despite having to haul water to the site in milk jugs. Which, btw, were a fairly new innovation at the time, and cost more than buying the milk in cardboard cartons. Since then I have found that unless you live in slug central, a double layer of broken down brown corrugated cardboard boxes covered by the cheap or free mulch of your choice - even including bagged wood mulches, as long as you avoid the ones that are dyed - and a drip irrigation system leave you with as near to a carefree garden as one could possibly hope for and still be living in the real world. Oh yeah, and not having other people do all the work for you, LOL! Mulching and measured drip irrigation also, it turns out, encourages earthworms, and that IS just like having other people do all the work for you as far as soil amendments. They aerate, they pull down the lower layers of mulch into the soil as it decomposes, they do all that soil "mixing" that double digging was supposed to do at the expense of back breaking labor. Except worms don't HAVE a backbone and this is what they do naturally. Don't pull the cardboard up to the base of the plants, instead leave an area clear all the way around the stem for where you will put your emitters (or aim your watering wand if you hand water). I also habitually plant everything but row crops (like peas) in a bowl-shaped depression to funnel water to the plant roots. I leave more area free around tomatoes because I plant them trench-style - I pluck off all but the top one or two sets of leaves, dig a trench that slopes upwards to where I want the stem to emerge. This encourages root development along the entire stem. I leave that entire area free of the cardboard mulch so the entire stem can easily be watered. I do pull the top mulch, which is usually wood mulch now that I'm stuck in suburbia, across the trench, but not all the way up to the stem. Leaving that clear eliminates slug damage, though that's not usually been a problem for me. If you have access to something easily compostable like straw or hay, you can just keep layering it with new mulch every year. Yes, hay has the reputation for being weedy, but you won't much notice that if you keep the mulch deep. Also the cardboard layers help to keep any weeds from rooting well, and the thick mulch makes anything that manages to poke its head above the top very spindly and easy to pull. Still, you might want to avoid hay when possible because sometimes it can infest your garden with bindweed, the seeds of which can lie dormant in the soil for virtually ever. This is only a problem when you STOP mulching, but there it is. The year I had access to unlimited amounts of hay, there were already much worse things than bindweed in that field, which had been farmed for decades and was thoroughly infested with giant hogweed already. However in an urban setting I've found that bagged wood mulches work just fine and with the cardboard underlayment, you don't need more than 2" or 3" depth. It will eventually rot, but not in less than several years. You can also often get mulch from yard waste the city has gathered and processed for little or no cash outlay. This is often at least partially composted. The cardboard lasts 2 years and sometimes more. If you're using a longer term top layer like wood mulch, you can easily pull it back (especially in raised beds) and lay down new cardboard. If you're using something like straw, you can just lay new cardboard on top of last year's mulch when the underlying cardboard has broken down. I'd plan on doing that every 3 years or so. Then cover over with your compostable short term mulch. Do not use grass clippings as a mulch. They mat easily and will tend to shed water. You might be tempted to use shredded paper as a mulch. In most parts of the country I advise you not to try that, at least not as a top layer. It, too, tends to compress, mat, and shed water - but worse than that it is usually mostly white paper, reflects too much sun, and keeps the soil not just cool, but unacceptably cold too far into the growing season. Instead I compost it with grass clippings to balance out the high nitrogen from grass clippings. Mulching with a cardboard underlayment works well with hand watering or drip irrigation. Don't even try it if you are top watering with something like an oscillation lawn sprinkler.

@daninthedirt, 8" is just the good stuff above the hardware cloth. Under that is decomposed granite AKA mostly sand with a little dirt. Hubs did dig down pretty far and tossed the soil around, but he didn't amend it. Nothing was growing there before, so it should have some nutrients.. The big worry is gophers. We do our best to control them, but it's an endless battle. There is no rock underneath. Decomposed Granite. The gophers have an easy life digging through sandish stuff. We do have lots of huge boulders on this property, but in this particular spot there are none. I am a huge fan of root pruning pots cuz I've seen the results with and without them. Air pruning a root is like pruning a branch. New branches appear. Same with roots. Nothing circles, just all the roots use every bit of dirt they can. It's a beautiful thing to see. If a gopher feels the need to nibble under the hardware cloth, the roots will just put out feeders. Pretty sure it will work. I'll be dosing with fertilizer often.