Thank you for your tips when thinking of RAISED garden beds.
Sonoma County in California has 200 gophers to an acre of land. We can’t use our own flat land with its own great sandy loam soil without fussing with killing the gophers every day. I learned at age 5 (now 89) how to shoot them with a 20-20 rifle as they popped their heads up from their holes, early mornings. We used to use left over remains of grapes to fertilize our large gardens. That’s not easily available anymore because the grape owners now use it in other ways that bring them extra money. I now use garden beds for my much smaller gardens, putting the beds directly on top of our soil after attaching wire across the bottom of the entire bed frame so gopher don’t get the plants. Thank you for your tips when thinking of RAISED garden beds. Though gophers can claw up frames a short height, raised garden beds don’t seem to entice gophers to try that. I’m also putting a drip watering system around/in my old flat garden beds and starting to build new raised garden beds for all the reasons you’ve noted in your story.