Raised Beds In Mediterranean Climate

I live in a hot dry Mediterranean climate (Crete) and made a garden with raised beds,  last year. In the winter it works ok but in the summer it's so hot and dry that the beds dry out so fast and I have to constantly water them. I notice the locals mostly do sunken beds, which makes sense now, and I want to try that next summer. My question is, would it make more sense to change my garden setup to permanent sunken beds, or do raised beds in winter and sunken beds in summer? Would sunken beds in winter get too waterlogged here? We get about 500-600 mm of rain annually.

I like the concept of a "volcano" bed, which is raised a bit around the edges, and sunken in the middle, plus lots of thick organic mulch blanketing any exposed soil inside. Depends a lot on your specific site conditions though, including slope, aspect, drainage, soil type/profile etc.

My preference is to edge the beds but not raise them. Then mulch heavily to retain moisture in the summer, and allow the mulch to rot down during the wet weather over the cooler months. Sunken beds would just get drowned here during wet weather.

My land is steep but terraced, so the land immediately surrounding each bed is level.

Mulch would help the beds not dry out so quickly.

If Sweet Alyssum will grow where you live it is excellent to use as a mulch and smells good.

Burra Maluca wrote:My preference is to edge the beds but not raise them. Then mulch heavily to retain moisture in the summer, and allow the mulch to rot down during the wet weather over the cooler months. Sunken beds would just get drowned here during wet weather.

My land is steep but terraced, so the land immediately surrounding each bed is level.

I have a feeling they would get drowned here too in the winter. What do you mulch with?

Alexandre,

The raised beds would dry anything in no time in my hot, arid, too sunny and windy foothill climate (I get 500 mm average precipitation). I have tried sunken trenches this year and they worked like a parabolic mirror reflecting even more heat to my plants. This year was a complete gardening disaster with cold spring and nothing germinating. When it became hot in summer I could see what the trenches did to tomatoes. Tomatoes normally do not want to produce and ripen in my place - due to too high temperatures and too intense sun, but they fared even worse by being torched by the heated sunken dirt. Mulching and twice a day watering did not help much. Pumpkins, zucchinis got all torched. Zucchinis normally produce a lot and I got only one [sic!] zucchini fruit this year. Next year I will just do flat gardening with gentle berms (10 cm max) around the plants.

Dareios Alexandre wrote:What do you mulch with?

Cut grass. We have a 'brush hog' to cut around the olive trees, which cuts the grass into fairly short lengths. We need to cut it anyway due to the fire risk so when it dries I rake up what I need and mulch with it.

Drip irrigation also works very well here.