Hello and welcome from S.W. Oregon. Raised beds are rather common around our area, I made two using incense cedar planks, presently I have kale in one and Swiss chard in the other, they are both great winter crops. The neighbor on our west side made raised beds out of Doug fir planks and the neighbor on our east side is making theirs out of concrete. Around here the soil is so acidic we need alternatives like raised beds to put better soil into to be able to grow vegetables, on the other hand the acidic soil is great for blueberries and growing all sorts of trees. Years ago we threw apple cores into the large chicken pen an ended up with about 10 volunteer apple trees, I reduced them down to 5 of the better trees and since then have other volunteer apple trees come up. Anyway, it's alway good to have soil test done to see what you may need to amend the soil with, we never had a really good garden until I brought in composted soil, every tomato we tried to grow ended up with bottom end rot, this is not good, it certainly made me feel like I had a brown thumb and couldn't even grow weeds all that well.
