Why destroy lawn? Unless you have small children to run and tumble on it or are a croquet enthusiast, a lawn is just lovely green wallpaper. That would be just fine if it required as much maintenance as actual wallpaper, but our wind-and-debris-swept, semi-arid front lawn is usually a crispy brown by the end of July, except where it is infested with dandelions, clover, hairy goat's beard, garden bellflower, black medic, and other assorted interlopers that announce to the neighbours and passersby that we neglect our grounds. We are not willing to pour on chemical fertilizer and weed killer and huge volumes of water; the result is not attractive. Also, before it gets to the crispy stage, lawn has to be mowed once in a while. The more items we insert into the lawn area - raised beds, shrubs, hops-on-a-bike - the more edges we have to trim.
Sheet mulching destroys lawn by covering it up, starving the grass and weeds to death, and building a new layer of growth medium on top of it. The ingredient list is long and exotic - blood meal, bone meal, seagrass, rice husks, stable sweepings, pine needles, sawdust, straw, to name a few. These are suggestions; you can use different inputs depending on what is available. I started with unfinished compost, just spread it on the lawn. Then scattered some bone meal we happened to have and a bag of gypsum we got this year because it's suppose to help soften up clay soil. Gave that a good watering and covered it up with corrugated cardboard. After wetting the cardboard, I piled on finished (I thought) compost and gave that a soaking. That compost hadn't been stirred in a while and smelled foul. I hoped that the wind would blow directly from the west so that only we would have to smell it. The final layer was straw, which took care of the aroma and should keep the layers underneath from drying out too fast. We should soon have a soft, moist, rich, weed-free environment in which to grow useful plants. Before laying down the sheet mulch layers, I dug holes and planted the new Borealis honeyberry bush and a daylily. The cardboard was fitted carefully around them as well as the crabapple tree. If smothering the roots of trees and shrubs is bad for them, I guess we will find out, eventually. 
This week I pulled back some straw and sprinkled a bit of topsoil in strips to plant of few seeds in a let's-see-how-this-works non-scientific experiment. The trial seeds are lettuce, garden cress, sage, coriander, thyme, bush beans, and radishes. Radishes will likely have a hard time because it's not far down to the cardboard layer which, while softening, is still intact. I pulled some of the straw back over to help protect from dessication. The seeds would germinate if they were covered more thoroughly, but I would't be able to find them. Without waiting to see if my short-cut approach to sheet mulching is going to be successful, I expanded the front lawn project last weekend and then appropriated a portion of back yard for a new strawberry bed. I think it's going to work. Two blades of grass were poking up through the straw layer on the front lawn yesterday. Maybe from the compost layer, maybe from seeds blown in. Definitely not from the lawn. More interesting is what appears to be a potato plant emerging. I'm going to let that one survive as long as it can. Further evidence that sheet mulching can work if done improperly can be seen in the sunchoke beds. Barry set the raised bed frame on the lawn, cut cardboard to fit and inserted it directly on top of the grass, added a layer of compost, filled with soil and poked in the tubers. They are doing very well and the base is now soft enough that a bamboo cane can easily be pushed down past ground level.
We are all out of finished compost now, so no more sheet mulching for a while. Lots of other work to do....
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