I usually have a plan written down before I start planting each year. If nothing else, it makes crop roation easier -- I have a record of what went where, so it can go in a different spot the next year. I wasn't obsessive about it. No to-scale drawings on graph paper or anything. Just an index card with a rectangle for each bed, filled in with the type of plant in that bed.
This year, I'm going freestyle. I know where I can't repeat the tomatoes and peppers, so they're pretty much limited to one bed each. Other than that, it's chaos. I'm trying to look at it as experimenting and to remember that change is actually good for keeping us young.
I still don't like change.
But I am interested in at least one experiment. I've got most of a long bed filled with alliums: a 30-foot row of garlic and three adjoining rows of red onions. But I left space at each end of the bed to put the butternut squash. Not enough space to grow the whole squash plant, but enough space for the roots of the plant. I'm hoping, if the timing is right, that the garlic will have been harvested by the time the squash vines start traveling too far from the roots, and they can fill the empty space where the garlic was. And then later expand into the area where the onions where. I seeded one end of the bed, but ran out of energy before I did the other end. One good thing, if the timing is off, is that the far end of the bed is near the fence around the garden, and in the worst case scenario, I can encourage the vines to climb up the fence.
Other than that, I planted a few zucchini plants in a gap at one end of the asparagus bed; a six foot row of Bright Lights swiss chard, with just a couple green bean plants in the middle of the row(because my co-gardener and her family don't eat green beans); and some dill in a planter that will eventually be over-run with mint, but at the moment only has a scraggly little bit in it, so I figure there's time for one crop of dill before the mint takes over.
