Trying to start a garden at this late date.

I recently moved into a new home, and I want to start a garden. I'm also planning on putting up a greenhouse this summer and don't have a lot of money to spare for the garden. There's a grassy area I want to use. There are also several compost pits I can dig up. If I broad-fork it, then use a shovel to turn the grass blocks over, then add compost, some purchased peat, and some purchased soil, will that work? I may be able to add maybe an inch or two, but there's also the soil in the grass roots.

I have seedlings ready to be planted. I need to do something soon. I thought about buying soil in bulk. Given the area I'm planting, I'd need 6 cubic feet for 4" of soil. In addition to the cost, I can't find any bulk soil suppliers around here (southern Vermont).

Good luck with this new garden Diane.

What's the soil under the turf like? I'd dig a test pit to see how deep the soil is and what sort of structure it has. If there is a reasonable depth of top soil, it's probably easiest to stack the turf elsewhere to turn into loam without risking grass regrowing in your garden area.
If there is little top soil, then inverting the turf and adding whatever you have on top to smother it sounds like a reasonable plan to me (that's sort of what I've been doing with my not-very-lazy beds). Maybe you could make beds with paths in between, to make the most of the soil you have. As long as you don't have pernicious weeds or weed seeds in your soil you ought to be able to make a good growing bed that way, especially if you are dealing with transplants rather than seeds.

If you dig in the compost and a couple inches of peat you'll be able to grow good crops immediately. I use a spade and push it in as far as it will go and turn the soil over so that the sod slides into the hole. I have raw clay and I never grew in sand so don't know for sure. If you had loam soil this method will also work.

Everyone's always in a rush to plant their garden as early as possible. A lot of veggies can be planted late. I can set out tomato seedlings in Pennsylvania as late as July 4th and still get tomatoes. Potatoes can be grown late and it makes storage so much easier if you want to store into late winter. A lot of crops grown for spring crops can also be grown for a fall crop. Here, in my opinion, it's too early to set out peppers. squash is just coming into the proper time to plant seeds.

Good comments above.

There are a lot of moving parts to a new garden. General climate, rainfall, frost-free days, etc. Digging test pits is really valuable. And more:  garden location, hours of sun exposure, microclimates, subsoil, drainage, etc. all factor in. The more detail you can give us, the better we can suggest ideas.

BTW, "late" is quite relative. We are only starting to plant this weekend, and yet we expect massive harvests before the frosts in the second week of September.

Don't over think it, just stick those plants in the ground.

You don't have to complete the whole soil prepping job before you start planting.

Thank you all for your replies.  I'm starting to feel better about this.

I moved to southern Vermont, which has a shorter growing season than I'm used to ( Long Island NY).  I'm putting in a temporary garden.  I'll spend the summer getting used to my new property ad deciding where everything will go 'permanently'.  In the meantime, food is getting expensive and sometimes in short supply.  So I want to grow as much food over the summer as I can.  Including cooler weather veggies, which I may be too late for.  But there's always the fall, right?

Next week I need to go back to the Island for one more week before I'm up here permanently.  I'm hoping to get everything in the ground before I leave.

And it will be 90 degrees out today!  Just had a bit of a rest, now it's back out to finish laying the boundaries before broad forking.