Gardening on a slope will keep your leg muscles strong, and it's a beautiful way to grow great food. Our hillside vegetable garden is on a northwest-facing mountainside at about 2,700 feet elevation. The elevation and exposure puts us in Zone 6b. The basic soil type is acid mountain clay, but after years of improvement it's now clay loam.
Here I'm posting photos and observations that may be of interest to others who are nurturing dreams of a beautiful hillside vegetable garden. Ours is made up of about 20 permanent beds that are terraced into the hillside.
To retain the beds, we use untreated boards from the sawmill down the road. The boards eventually rot and need replacing, but that's an easy job to take care of in spring. One-inch thick poplar boards worked well enough, but we have replaced most of them with thicker hemlock, which was the sawmill special a couple of years ago.