I was a die hard raised bed gardener until I saw my yard on Google Earth. Thanks to satellite views you can pick out everyone in the neighborhood with a vegetable garden. Probably not a good thing unless you don't mind everyone descending on you when the SHTF. Now I am mixing things up. I am planting in irregular beds, in 5 gallon buckets for portability, and we put a few asparagus plants in among the weeds. We also have lettuce and radishes mixed in the the weeds. The front yard landscape has veggies too.
I am always adding compost to my nasty desert clay that passes for soil around here. Having hens is a huge benefit. Their water pans gets dumped into the gardens for fertilizer and we compost the straw and bedding from the coops. All egg shells are dried, ground up and added back to the soil since we lack calcium.
If (or probably *when*) the SHTF, we are screwed when it comes to water since we live in the desert. Right now we have lots of sturdy buckets that we use to collect rainwater and condensation from the a/c (about 4 gallons a day off the a/c in the summer). If things get bad we'll be hauing the buckets down the street to the canal to get water for the plants.
FYI - I get 4 and 5 gallon buckets from a friend who manages a restaurant. Begs me to tell people to come and get them since they just get thrown out. So - if you need buckets for food storage, water hauling or growing plants - please call your local restaurant, sandwich shop, caterer etc. They'll probably be thrilled to have you take them off their hands.