We’re blessed with temperate weather in Southern California, perfect for growing all kinds of vegetables and flowers year-round ... if only we could get a spade into our soil.

That’s the rub with SoCal gardening. So many of us have yards with terrible soil, often compacted, poor-draining clay, depleted of nutrients. Little wonder that so many people eager to grow food are turning to raised garden beds, which permit you to add your own loamy, nutrient-rich soil without the backbreaking business of trying to dig up rocky or hardpan ground.

If you’re thinking about going the raised-bed route this summer, you need to act quickly, so your tender seedlings have a chance to get established before the high heat of summer is upon us. But gardening in raised beds is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get a good garden going, and one recommended by gardening pros, if you follow these tips:

1. Choose a raised bed that’s at least 18 inches deep to ensure that deeper-rooted vegetables have ample room to grow.

2. Keep the width narrow so you can easily reach to the middle of the bed.

3. Locate the bed in a sunny location.

4. If the bottom of your raised bed touches native soil, keep the bed away from trees. “Tree roots will gravitate to the easiest source of water and nutrients,” said Sophie Pennes of Urban Farms L.A. “I haven’t seen this problem with citrus, but your bed shouldn’t be anywhere near an ornamental tree, especially a ficus.”

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5. Use the best organic soil you can afford, preferably bagged soil so you can be confident about the ingredients. “You’re wasting your money if you don’t use good soil,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, who builds cedar raised beds and edible gardens through his nursery business, Fig Earth Supply.

6. It’s important to fill your raised bed to the top because the soil will compress over time and keep getting lower. “The box itself can create a shadow on your plants if it’s not filled to the top,” Pennes said. “And then you get a moist environment in that area that’s partially shaded. Spiders and slugs love to live in corners of shady, moist places, so it’s important to fill your box all the way.”

7. Set up a drip irrigation system on its own timer, so you can adjust the watering based on what your vegetables need.

8. Mulching can help retain moisture, but there’s an alternative.

You can grow practically anything in a raised bed, gardening experts say, but because you have limited space it makes sense to move larger, sprawling plants to another location.

For instance, pumpkin plants will easily overfill a 4-by-8-foot raised bed, unless you install a tall sturdy trellis that can support the weight of the pumpkins, or you train the plant to sprawl outside the bed (happy pumpkin plants can easily take over a garden space).

You can train pumpkins to grow around corn stalks in a three sisters garden (adding beans to grow up the corn stalks), but corn and pumpkins require lots of space and don’t produce any food until the end of the season, so consider whether you want to devote your raised bed to food you can’t eat until the fall.

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Artichokes, as well as zucchini and other squashes, also take up a large amount of space, so consider planting those in a separate area.

Blueberries do well in containers because they need acidic soil, but again, they can grow very large when they’re happy, so consider planting them in their own large pots.

Here’s a list of plants that Pennes, Kranz and Fitzpatrick recommend as the best bets for raised beds during the summer — plants that work well grown close to other plants and that give you the biggest bang for the buck as far as producing food.

Note that cool-season plants, such as broccoli, celery and lettuce, are better to plant in the late fall and winter, because hot temperatures cause them to bolt (flower and go to seed) quickly and turn bitter. But if you get them planted soon you might be able to squeeze out a crop before our high-heat days in July, August and September, especially if the plants are shaded by taller crops like tomatoes.

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Jeanette Marantos started writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1999, doing Money Makeovers until 2002. She returned to write for The Times’ Homicide Report in 2015 and the Saturday garden section in 2016, a yin and yang that kept her perspective in balance. In early 2020, she moved full time into Features, with a focus on all things flora. She is a SoCal native who spent more than 20 years in Central Washington as a daily reporter, columnist, freelancer and mom before returning to the land of eucalyptus and sage. Her present goal is to transform her yard into an oasis of native plants, fruit trees and veggies.