About 7 sheets of newspaper would be good, the paper will decompose, unlike many landscape fabrics, yet would help prevent weed growth for a season.

That or a couple of layers of wet (saturated) cardboard.

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I always put gopher-wire in the bottom of my raised beds, I don't know if you have a gopher problem but for me they are one of the main reasons I have raised beds. I put gopher block and then newspaper.

I have five raised beds that were placed on vigorous lawn/weeds. I only placed a four or five sheet layer of newspaper on the bottom of the bed and filled it in with soil. I never had an issue with weeds or grass coming up through. Plus the newspaper decomposes over time allowing roots to penetrate the native soil.

Worked for me.
Kim

Here is a link that might be useful: My Garden

Because of a terrible problem with gophers, moles and voles here we line our beds with wire. We first started 25 years ago with chicken wire but that rusted out quickly so went to hardware cloth but that also rusted out. Finally a couple of years ago we used stainless steel wire which should last almost forever. Getting too old to keep digging up the beds and replacing the wire.

Thanks to you all, I actually ended up using all your suggestions, cardboard over some tough grassroot areas, when I ran out of that I used layers of newspaper. The new raised garden overlapped a lot of last years garden, so I didn't put down anything in that area.

I'm thinking about this very thing, so thanks for bringing up which kind of wire to use to control gophers. I'm in SoCal and have a large yard full of gophers (and nettles, which deserve a post of their own). I don't think I can adequately control the gophers with traps or other methods, at least not until I can get a barn owl family to move in.

I plan to put in several raised beds with gopher wire underneath. I'm very glad to hear that ss wire will last. I do have two questions - how deep should I bury the wire to ensure plants have enough root space, and what size mesh to use? I assume gophers can squeeze through pretty small holes, but also assume the larger the mesh the better for the garden.

thanks! sb

The plants will send roots down through the mesh. If you are planning on growing root crops (for example, carrots), you probably want to give them some extra depth beyond the typical fruit size.