We bought this house at the end of June, eight years ago, with a decent size south-facing back yard. There were a couple of flower beds around the border, but mostly it was just a lot of grass to cut, as you can see in the "before" picture below. It was too late in the year to do much gardening, but I did plant a few veggies in the beds, and they did reasonably well.
It was a couple of years later that we really got to work! I definitely wanted a large vegetable garden, even though hubbie wanted to keep it in grass. He lost that battle, and I compromised on a slightly smaller garden than I originally planned. To eliminate the work of removing all the sod, we chose to use the lasagna method of garden building.
Fortunately spring came early that year. We started in April, when the ground was warm enough to work, and the sod wasn't really growing yet, so it was easier to remove. After marking out the new garden area, we only removed enough sod around the perimeter to build a low garden wall. With the existing flower bed and a large shed, we only had to dig out 2 sides of the garden. Then we placed the blocks for the wall. An apple tree and non-working fountain remained in place.
The next step was to cover the planting area. We'd saved our moving boxes from the previous year for just this purpose. In the past, we'd built a bed using newspapers, but found that cardboard does a much better job and is easier to work with, especially on a windy day! Just make sure to remove all of the tape. The cardboard kills the grass, which then becomes composted into the underlaying soil.
Give the cardboard a good soaking. It has to be really, really wet! And make sure you overlap the pieces quite a bit, I'd say at least 6 inches. Otherwise you'll have grass poking up through the cracks, and that's a headache to deal with later. To help it decompose faster, add a good sprinkle of blood meal before adding the next layer.
And the next layer is, of course, compost. Add a good thick layer of the stuff, about 6 inches or so. We used about 4 inches, and I would make it thicker if I did it again. If you don't make your own compost, or don't have enough, I recommend having a load delivered. Buying bags of compost for any sizeable area isn't very economical. Since we didn't set the wall in place permanently, we could easily remove a section to barrow the compost in.
This step used the most physical labour, and it certainly helps if you share the workload. If you don't have your own teenager, you may be able to rent one from down your street! On top of the compost, we added another layer of soil, also about 4 inches, for a total of about 8 inches of material. I believe we used about 6 yards of each for this space, but again, it would have been better had it been deeper.
An advantage of using the lasagna method, is that you can plant right away. I kept the first garden very simple, with some root vegetable, beans & onions. Here's where the depth comes in. Although everything grew quite well, all of our carrots were L-shaped in that first year! They didn't want to grow through the cardboard layer, so they just hit the cardboard and grew sideways. But they still tasted great!
Things have changed a lot since then. We removed the shed and replaced it with compost bins. This opened up the garden to the light, and extended it almost to the fence. We also removed the fountain which had never worked, so now I'm able to plant the full space.
And in my war against grass, last year I was finally able to convince my other half to build more beds throughout the back yard. We used the same lasagna method, but this time without installing walls or edging of any kind. Here are a couple of pictures from last year. The first is taken from the same perspective as the one directly above. You can see the shed & fountain are gone, replaced by compost bins.
The picture below is taken from the same perspective as the "before" picture, showing almost the entire yard, with a tiny bit of grass in the pathways to keep my husband happy.
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