I grow on the flat, I don't have a real problem with wet ground. You probably need raised if a wet area. We did try one year with a few small beds by just using our tiller, then raking the ground from the sides to the top over and over. Hard work, but got it done. Decided it wasn't for us, too dry. We didn't put board sides on.

I built a bed shaper this year by cutting a 6 foot grader blade in half then building a tapered shaper pan. I bought a lot of the steel new and built a plastic mulch layer on the back of it for around 300.00 but I had a shop full of tools to work with.

i used a potato hiller (2 discs on a tool bar) to form raised beds for sweet potatoes, but it doesn't form a flat topped bed unless you follow it with rake.

I make raised beds with our Disc hiller too, here are some we just made to plant tomatoes today. I couldn't run along the outside, so I had to shovel and rake them up.

This is what our disc hiller looks like. This isn't my tractor, I tried it out with my parents tractor at their farm. I have a little Kubota B7100, it works just fine with it too!

We get flat topped beds if we widen out the disks and driver really fast.

Here are some raised beds we did last year for our winter squash. We laid drip tape on the ground, covering it up every 20 to 30 feet with a shovel full of dirt and then we came back and made the raised bed over the drip tape. When we turned on the drip tape, it really wetted the whole raised bed.

Here is half of the very flat field.

Jay

Thanks folks,
that's all really helpful. I have seen discs used like that before following a tiller and it seemed to work well. Guessing that would also be a cheapish option for people like me who don't have a full shop for building things.
I especially like the idea of throwing the dirt onto pre-laid drip tape - great idea Jay.

Some farms I have worked at have done a lot of labour intensive shovelling of dirt out of the paths etc so I'm keen to find a better way.

Also wondering on a small scale for the first year if I can just use a furrower on a wheel hoe.. I think some people use them to hill potatoes?

I used a KY cultivator make mini-hills a few years ago. I also planted my onions with it. Made 1 furrow, tossed the onion sets into it, and covered it with another furrow throwing over the first.