It is good to have good friends.
Your number 2 option would a waste of efforts and not practical. You will end up with a clay container.Your garden will get water logged.You do not need to take away anything; here is how:

Frame your veggies bed first(maybe just the foundation).
Then dig it one shovel depth. If it is dry and hard, water it thoroughly, leave it overnight and do it next day.
When you dig, pick all the rocks, stones, with rake, hand.
Now dump maybe half of your compost/manure on it, spread it evenly and turn it over, mixing clay soil with compost/manure.
Then dump the rest of compost/manure on it, spread, level it. I would turn it over again and level it.
Now go ahead and plant in it.
Clay soil is not that bad. Actually, when it is amended as described it is very good and benefitial. It can hold nutrients and moisture longer. I do gardening in GA, the soil is 100% red clay. I know it first hand, I have done it.
Compost and manure alone will have a lot of air in it and water (with nutrient)will sink down as fast ascyou can say "AH"(grin).

Raised bed where the ground underneath is clay make sense, when you have lots of rain from time to time. Raised bed will never get waterloged. Most garden veggies/herbs do not like their feet wet.

With annual garden you can always keep amening the soil. With some perenial herbs/veggies you cannot.

Raised beds make sense on heavy clay if only for the drainage. Also, being in a shorter-season zone you'll benefit from the way the soil in raised beds warms up earlier.

A mix of clay soil and well composted manure is a great foundation for a thriving garden because most clay soils are naturally rich in nutrient. But get a soil test done anyway so that you'll know if you need lime (most eastern soils do), and how much and if you've got anything unexpected to cope with.

Raised beds aren't the end all and be all of gardening that some people claim they are but when you've got heavy clay, especially heavy, WET, clay they're very helpful.

Tip -- if you're growing plants like summer squash that spread their roots wide (I just pulled my first planting and found their roots spread between 2-3 feet from the center of the hill), either make sure to make the bed large enough or create a place where they can grow directly in the ground.

The soil here is heavy red clay, and I've been growing in bermed or raised beds here since 1995. Adding compost, manure...anything for organic tilth will improve your ability to weed and work the soil. Plants don't have a problem with the red clay, WE do. The clay is hard to work unless it has the exactly perfect water content. Too dry and you'll break your heart trying to dig in 1/4", too wet and you're mixing concrete gumbo when you dig in it. Perfect moisture level and red clay slices like butter and works up just fine.

Don't dig out and replace your clay, add your amendments and just keep turning and enriching the clay. I also like mulching the walkways between my beds because then I can go out into the garden even after a heavy rain without becoming a muck-monster with huge red clay feet.

Hello carajon....here at my place we have the black clay dirt. I have raised rows but without support. It was a lot of work at first but well worth the effort. The first step was to kill all the grass in the planned garden.(Used roundup). Then I tilled the entire area. Then I shoveled walkways out by putting the dirt on the adjacent row. I made the raised rows 2' wide and the walkways also 2'. Tilled in some cow manure and compost making the rows even higher. Without support, when it rains the rows sort of melt down into the walkways a little but with 2' wide walkways it does not hurt. Once a year I till out the walkways throwing the dirt back onto the rows. Sure makes for easier weeding. I use hay on the walkways to keep out weeds and grass and by the end of the year it has composted into the dirt. Long post just to say you can make raised rows without support. Good luck....Dayton

I started off gardening on my current property with heavy clay. I framed a 25'x25' area in with old rail road ties and then dumped sandy loam topsoil and compost over the top of the clay to a depth of 4-6".

In the spring when I needed to get seeds and plants in the ground it would be mud. I couldn't walk in the garden without seriously compacting the soil and of course getting really muddy.

The compost didn't seem to last more than a single season and I had to replace cubic yards each year to replace it. It was pretty back breaking labor with all I had to haul around.

Then the weeds became a serious problem. The time I wanted to spend relaxing and enjoying the garden I had to spend weeding. I tried to reduce weeding by using mulches, but when it would rain and the clay turned to muck the mulch would just get pressed into the muck.

To get to the point I ended up building some frames for raised beds and sowed grass seed everywhere there wasn't a raised bed to deal with the soggy spring/fall soil.

This was 4 years ago and there hasn't been a single day I have regretted it. Much easier to work, weeding is much less time consuming, I can walk in the garden any time of year without compacting the soil etc.

If I had to do it all over again I *might* have left some of the area as an in ground rather than raised bed area. I might have left an area for the warm season, very large plants that tend to grow out of raised beds. Other than that raised beds have been the best garden decision I ever made.

I have 16, 4x16ft. raised beds and I love them. they are 12 inches high and I have a little garden cart I just wiz along on when planting, weeding, harvesting etc. I used cedar, a bit pricey but we'll see if worth it as it is suppose to last longer. Easy to build, myself and a girlfriend did them in a day. This year my husband built mini-hoops to go over them w/ electrical conduit attached w/c-clamps and plastic over them and I was planting spring crops in mid-March when I would have had to wait til mid-May for last frost date. Easier to amend soil, warms up faster etc. Great system. Love them.

I built nine 8'x3.5' raised beds this past spring on the heaviest, stickiest clay you could imagine. I mixed ALOT of horse manure into them. They are great, and when I pulled out all the plants two weeks ago and replanted for fall season, I couldn't believe it was the same soil. I added two more inches of composted cow manure and turned it in. The soil is like chocolate cake. I particularly like that I can work each bed and its crop without disturbing any others. And, each bed takes only about an hour and a half to clean out, replant, and remulch. I love it!

The one drawback I see is that the raised beds do dry out more quickly, even with a good thick mulch. (Don't even try to garden on heavy clay without mulch.) I am trying a new technique of sinking newspaper lined 3 gallon pots into the ground and then planting the seeds around the pot. Then, when you water, you fill up the pot and the water trickles down slowly right at the plant roots. We'll see, but I am hopeful.

g'day carajon,

just gotta be raised beds hey once done gardening is just too easy.

come visit our page for ideas.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens garden page

Thanks for all the advice! Just one follow-up question - what about asparagus and berries? Since raised beds don't last forever, it it a bad idea to use them for plants that should last for years?

Also, any thoughts on hemlock or locust to build the beds? I can get reasonably priced hemlock that is 2" thick by 12" wide, while cedar is desperately expensive.

Thanks again!

I don't know anything about hemlock's durability, but I can vouch for the incredible durability of locust when in contact with the ground. I've seen a lot of locust posts stand for decades.

IMO, for perennial crops the best raised bed material is some form of masonry.