no good creating a pile that is extra work, start the bed and add as you get the material.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens straw bale garden

The rave on Lasagna garden is the no-till organic garden.
I till, but as I understand it you can add to the layers as you find materials, just like a cold compost pile, only you do not turn it.
This should work well for you, if you have no invasive weeds.

That depends. Do you have all the material you need now? Build that bed now. Don't have all the materials needed? Build that bed as you go.
Keep in mind that you will be building that bed forever, as the Soil Food Web digests the material that is there and as that material then needs to be replaced.

As long as you can keep your smother layer (paper/cardboard) in place, you can absolutely cover it gradually. The sooner you get started, the sooner you can use it. If you get to a point where everything under the smother layer is dead but it hasn't decomposed much, just remove it & garden at will!

It's better to do a small area throughly than a larger area with a skimpy layer.

So if you have enough grass and dead leaves and such for a 4x4 section, do that and plant it. Don't try to stretch it across a 4x12 bed.

When I had the luxury of time (moved to a new house in early June and couldn't start a vegetable garden until the following year) I built a super nice bed over the summer. It got to be about 2 feet tall and by the following year, 2008, was about half that size. By 2011, it was already decomposed to the level of adjacent sod. There are loads of earthworms and it's easy to dig.

Since then, I have rushed to build more beds. New this year is one dedicated to winter squash. I had a weedy, overgrown perennial flower bed. Dug out the plants I wanted to save and weed whacked the rest. Dug holes for squash. Spread newspapers and topped with fresh grass clippings. I will add to this bed throughout the summer and subsequent years. I put composted horse manure in each planting hole and added the squash seeds.

I don't like grass clippings to get too thick because they mat down and don't seem to decompose. I'll add chopped leaves, a little bit of wood ashes, etc.

When I want a path between small beds, I lay down papers and grass clippings. The following year I can shovel the composted material onto the bed, esp if I decide to re-arrange it. We have wider paths that are kept mowed so we have access for the garden cart and tractor.

Agree with poster who said the beds will need new material each year. I always add a few inches of composted horse manure in the spring. The year I didn't add to one bed because I was in a rush to plant spinach, the second batch of spinach in the manured beds grew much bigger and healthier looking.

Lee Reich called it weedless gardening before lasagna was thought of. Using Ruth Stout's method work well here--cover crops, too.

A few years ago we built a lasagna bed over time starting in early winter and planted perennials and shrubs in mid spring.

My 5 yr old niece had helped add materials on days she visited. She seemed eager to rake it smooth, dump the buckets, add more straw, tear up paper, etc. One nice spring day on our way out to the garden with a bag of coffee grounds she took one look at the bed where my son had unloaded a mound of mucky duck manure from under raised pens and said in a serious tone, "Aunt Corrine, I'm not eating that lasagna."

What was she thinking?

Now when she visits she checks up on her toad house (sideways broken clay pot) in the back part of that garden and comments about the plants growing there. She notices how tall and full the garden has grown. She still asks me why we called it a lasagna garden.