Im planing my 2017 garden.. I did well last year, small plot 30x40ish, but working 60+ hours a week in the summer plus weeding, and everything else life tossed at me was a pain...Between the chickens, the dog, mowing, landlord bullshit, food plots and gearing up for deer season I was working all day, coming home and working till dark, hell I weeded a few times with a head lamp.. I need to change some things this summer.. On top of all the shit I just listed, Im going to start breeding shepherds, I'm going to pick up a bride for my boy in two weeks, so Im going to be busy this spring/summer raising a pup.. I have some time off this winter, and was thinking about building some raised beds for my garden, In hopes it would keep the weeding down a bit in hopes to offset the time so I can raise/train my new pup and still have some family time. Rather than till my entire plot down, I was thinking I could build beds, load it with compost and soil now, and have less to do come spring.. Pros/cons of raised beds? Crops I need, Corn, cucumbers, peppers, carrots, garlic, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, onions, and squash... I also want to double, maybe triple my bean output, we went through 30 jars of dilli beans in 2 months ...

You don't need raised beds, you need better gardening practices.

Utilize the false seed bed technique.
Utilize cover crops, proper sowing density, and mulch.

A 30x40 is nothing. Buy a round bale of straw, use it to mulch your garden after your plants come up, after utilizing the false seed bed. You will never weed again.

Oh, stop pulling weeds by hand. That sucks.

Buy proper weefing equipment and cut weeds off when they are monocots and dicots. 

Hmmmm... off to research....

This may help get you started

link

Raised beds usually require more water, use better weed control as suggested.

I was planning on installing soaker hoses in each bed, and have a gravity fed water barrels full of rainwater from my barn and house..... My thought with raised beds, no more using the tractor to till, so I could leave a semi permanent water system up. I know it sounds crazy building all this in hopes of simplifying my life, but I have the time now, and won't later.. 'Ill look into the better weed control practices. If using a plastic barrier considered a no-no? I will not use chemicals ever..

Soakers are OK, but they go to shit relatively quickly. I have had more issues than I care to mess with on my soaker hose setup. IF I didn't have so much invested in them, I may change to drip irrigation. But anyway..

No till works wonderful, if you use chemicals. I have read a bunch on no-till, and it is 100% dependent on pesticides/herbicides (at least on a commercial basis, maybe there are methods for smaller garden plots that are more organic friendly). Personally, I see no issue with working the top inch or so of the soil as often as needed. 

As far as plastic, I think it would be OK, since plastic does a wonderful job of never going anywhere. I'm sure the plastic WILL leach some kind of chemical into the soil with the intense sunlight, but I don't know 100% on that one. I've never used plastic.

I really would look into the false bed. Once you get done killing weed seedlings for the year (the first month), there is VERY little weeding to do (even with exposed soil) the rest of the year, or until you turn the soil again. If you get either a cultivator for your tractor, or a wheel hoe with weed sweeps, you will find that your will spend no time at all weeding. I weed my entire garden (over 3000sq ft) in about 2 hours. With automatic irrigation, once crops are in and going, my first month or so is about 5 hours a week in the garden, and then less than that until I start harvesting stuff. 

I'm going to build a 3 point weed burner for next year. I will burn the top of the soil really good before I do anything, which should kill a bunch of weed seeds before I harrow and cultivate. Will also be handy for when the weeds are ready for killing, but its too wet to cultivate.

I use 8-12" of grass clippings over my entire bed to control weeds.  Works great.  Also I dug out a 12" deep "basin" under each bed the length and width of the bed in the clay soil.  I then mixed compost from the local village dump and some of the clay I dug out into the bed.  The water drains through the compost in the bed real well but is partially held in the basin under the bed.  In theory it will "wick" back up as the compost mixture dries from the top.

I am thinking about a small garden too.  By a raised bed, I planned on a raised cinder block planter or a large tub.  Would that require more water than in ground, considering it is a dry climate, hot, and my existing soil is like concrete?  I am talking small change, like 10ft x 10ft. I want some juicy vine ripened maters and maybe some peppers or pickling cucumbers.  

I plan on drip irrigation, netting to keep out birds, and maybe some shade screen if required.  

I have a pretty simple drip system on a Toro controller w/ rain sensor.  It has been amazing.

I have 'water corners' on all 3 of my raised beds and with that I have individual control over watering with those valves.  Works great for me YMMV.

I'm in Georgia. I started off gardening with raised beds 10 years ago. Had absolutely fantastic results for the 4 years I did it that way. Decided I wanted to expand and have a bigger garden. Got the tractor out, tilled up a large plot and planted. Pain in the ass every year for 4 years I did it. Weeds took over and in the south you have to water anyway. Went back to raised beds 2 years ago and couldn't be happier. 

Hard to explain... the lay out without a pic but I will try.. It was a rectangle, (obviously) and the northern corner was 8 rows of corn, it ran east west... At the end of the corn, on the east end was tomatoes and beans.. The south side of the garden the rows ran north south, cucumbers, peppers, squash, and carrots.. and at the very southeast corner I have compost bin made from pallets that I toss all the weeds, yard clippings, chicken manure and bedding, and compost in... It gets worked over all year long and is spread in the fall after I till the garden under.. I used straw for weed control, but the area around the peppers and cucumbers got hammered in weeds... I could spend 2-3 hours weeding a day, and come back the next day and bam weeds again.. Even with the squash and cucumbers starting to choke out the weeds, it was still a 2 hour a day job just for that corner.. It literally looked like a lawn, just weeds and grass everywhere ( Ironically we had dry year last year and I could not get grass to grow anywhere else, besides in my garden)...I need to 3x my bean output this year as well, so I was thinking corn and beans in a traditional bed both running east west for about 8-10 rows.. Then building some raised beds for everything else..

Yield of the raised beds, compared to the regular per square foot? My only reasoning for the raised beds is less work weeding, and perhaps a more organized look to my plot.. I have a touch of the OCD and like things to be neat and orderly..  I also want to start growing thing like garlic, onions, and asparagus... I thought raised beds would be ideal for a thing like asparagus that you really cant ( I think?) till under...

The beauty of raised beds is that you can weed a 4'X8' bed in 15-20 mins and you feel like you accomplished something.  Easy to knock out 1 or 2 beds each evening without killing yourself.

Yes, my yields are higher as well with the raised beds. I think it is easier to concentrate the fertilizer and nutrients in a raised bed. Our soil around here is primarily clay and a pain to keep the PH balanced so the beds and good soil help with that as well. My asparagus is in a raised bed as well for the very reason you brought up. 

Thank you for this.. I agree I need better practices and will be using the false weed bed for my corn and beans at least, but the more I read, it seems like raised beds due offer some benefits.. Perhaps, I will place things like garlic, asparagus in some small beds this year and test the waters..

im going to raised beds this year and trash can potatoes, im tired of fighting Florida weeds

I've been doing raised beds for the past 7 years.

I went with them because the yard has very poor drainage (standing water for 2-3 days after a rain) and it is easier on my back not having to bend over as much.

My 4 beds (planning on making 2 more this spring) are 8' long, 4' wide and 2' deep.  and it gives me plenty of room to plant what I want for the summer.

Thanks for that !

Buried in there is a link to the Hoss Wheel Hoe, neat tool from a bygone age.
http://www.easydigging.com/hoss-wheel-hoe.html

I have never heard of it, and none of the gardeners I know use one, so I suspect they haven't either.
Looks to make short work of many chores in the small garden.  I hope to get one.

Wonderful tool. If nothing but the weed sweeps and stirrup hoe. The cultivator teeth are surprisingly effective as well.

Save yourself a couple hundred dollars and just get a Stirrup Hoe.  Best gardening tool I ever bought.  I paid $7 for mine at Menards, and it came with a 10 year warranty.

After lots of googling, I set up a drip tape system (google it, much different than a regular drip system) this year and ran it using a timer...AWESOME results, it was really amazing, but I honestly don't have any other watering systems to compare it to. Before this everything was watered with a hose...

Depends how big your garden is on whether a stirrup hoe is adequate. 

I use the same Menards hoe (I sharpen mine to a knife edge and keep a file in my back pocket while working. Makes live SOOO much easier) around the plants, then use the Hoss in the more open areas. Saves a bunch of time in a larger garden with wider rows.

I do no-till, they are kind of raised beds, basically I just pilled compost on top of the lawn and started gardening. Some people put down cardboard of newspaper first to help kill the grass. I really didn't have any problems.

another technique is to water the area when it gets over 50 degrees and let the weed seeds sprout and them cover them with cardboard or tarps etc for a few weeks to kill them, then plant without describing the soil and bring up more weed seeds.

Theres an english guy on youtube with lots of well done videos on the subject.

I spend almost zero time on "gardening" maybe 5 minutes a day

Google "Square Foot Gardening". I started using the square foot gardening a couple of years ago and never looked back. I spend no to little time weeding, raised my bed on cinder blocks so I dont have to bend over and kill my back, and used an automatic watering system ( drip irrigation ) so I dont have to worry about watering all the time. My garden takes care of itself for the most part.

Look at:

Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

I agree.  Mulch, cover crops and proper sowing density.  Keep that soil covered and keep things growing on it all of the time.  I would also recommend companion planting.  My corn patch this year is going to include 3 species of bean, Kushaw squash, watermelons, cantaloupes, sunflowers and, of course, corn.  Last year, I didn't include the sunflowers or melons, and it was still enough to choke out the damned Bermuda that tried to move in.

It's a wee bit late in the year for winter cover crops, but here is a youtube black hole for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMdWnfjs8s

That's the first part of a 9 or 10 part series on youtube.  He likes to use cover crop cocktails with a minimum of five different species from a minimum of three different types of plants.  I've found that the more species that I have in a plot, the fewer weeds I get.