This year (or next) my husband and I are planning to lay down paver patio in our backyard. Currently, the grass in our backyard is overgrown with weeds (we inherited the house from his parents and with it a lawn that was never watered, or fertilzed. just cut, and not often).

So, we're hoping to come up with an inventive way to deal with disposal of the sod we dig up in the excavation site. As part of our patio design, we thought it might be nice to have raised garden beds along the perimeter of our fence, made of either brick or wood (brick if we want to incorporate it into the design of our patio). My question is this; Can we build raised garden beds and use them as compost bins? Here's the plan in our heads:

1. build raised garden beds to house the old sod (which will likely have lots of soil and dirt with it)

2. place the old sod (soil and all) in the garden beds using the lasagna method (sod upside down, newspaper on top, sod right side up, newspaper on top, etc.)

3. The top layer of the garden bed would be sheet mulch. If we can plant right away, we'd like to. otherwise, we'd simply disguise the compost with some nice potted plants.

4. Next year, once everything has decomposed, we hope to either use the compost in our resodding plan for the backyard OR just start planting in the beds!

Does this sound doable? My DH and I are complete novices and former condo dwellers with very little knowledge of gardening. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!