I decided to do a "No-Till" bed this fall. The no-till strategy is a great, lazy person's way to quickly establish a garden bed. All you need is the stuff you've saved-- or should have saved-- from mowing the lawn and trimming the bushes all summer. Yup, all that crap you set out at the curb for the trash man every week is exactly what you should have kept for one of the easiest and best gardening techniques ever devised.
Also known as sheet-mulching or sheet-composting-- the method is well covered in Patricia Lanza's book "Lasagna Gardening"-- it involves the preparation of a garden bed by layering different organic materials into a ready-to-plant growing medium. You can read the book, or just get a reasonably good idea of how it works from what I did.