Planting with no time to plan... Help and suggestions?

I have started reading Gaia's Garden and reding a bit online about permaculture, and being a relatively ignorant garden I don't know where to start.
We have a plot that we plant with :
Tomatoes, peppers (chili and sweet) zucchini, egplant, string beans, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce and spinach.

We plant these in rows, with those black breathable tarp things as mulch.

Our planting area is about 3 meters by 9 meters. We have a short growing season, for example we can grow cherry tomatoes but larver tomatoes don't mature in time.

Because of the short season, we have to plant next wekend, and the more i read the more complicated it seems to start and i wonder if this is the wrong season? Should we plant as normal this sumer and plan better to transform this fall?

Thanks all!

One thing I do--if I already have bare soil--is to put the seeds on the soil and just cover them with bagged/bought/made soil. I scatter the seeds that need to be planted deeply first, throw soil on them. Then throw out the ones that need 1/4 inch of soil and scatter soil on top of them, and then the ones that need a dusting of soil, and dust soil on them. It's faster than digging rows, and works pretty well when I'm building a new garden bed and am adding soil to it one way or another. This way, I add the soil as I plant. Sometimes I toss the seeds out without caring about rows. Other times, I use a stick to make a row, put the seeds in it, and sprinkle soil on them.

Thanks, Nicole, I never thought of that.

Hi Meyer, in my opinion, if what you have been doing works for you, don't change it.  Get everything in as normal this year, and think about what you want to do for next year.  Maybe think about planting one or two things differently or new, but honestly, if it ain't broke don't fix it :)

Meyer Raymond wrote:
Because of the short season, we have to plant next wekend, and the more i read the more complicated it seems to start and i wonder if this is the wrong season? Should we plant as normal this sumer and plan better to transform this fall?

This is what I would do for this season. If you feel adventurous after your regular vegetables are in the ground, you might toss in some basil with your tomatoes, maybe some marigolds scattered about. Don't become paralyzed trying to do it all 'just right'. Keep it fun, and dump the stress!

Thank you all!
Our veggie garden is about 3 meters wide by 20 meters long. We have already tilled (oops) after the last frost with some cow and horse manure and some of our chicken and rabbits'poop/pee/straw. The chickens have been free to roam the veggie garden all winter, so hopefully they haven't depleted the soil or eaten all of the good soil inhabitants.
Above our veggie garden is the chicken run that has two huge plum trees (ramassin:a small, purple plum native to our area, I've heard them called damson variety on slow food web page) and a fig tree that shade the garden, which only gets full sun in one corner.
Because of this we always plant all of the nightshades in the same places, which I'm sure isn't good, and is what got me to reading up on permaculture in the first place.
The logical solution I'm sure is to plant veggies that like part shade... But we are tomato junkies...
This year i want to add some perennials, like artichokes and asparagus, but am freaking our because i worry that I'll put them in the wrong spot and have screwed up perennially!

This year we are also going to plant more winter crops, we always put some cabbage, one year i tried kale (the only variety i could find here is called "black tuscan cabbage) and it produced late summer trhough January, it was Ginormous and produced way more than we could eat. Brussel sprouts survive but are small, i think I'll try again.
We have been habitual once a year planters, with the exception of green beans, spinach, greens etc that we plant and re-plant.
I am interested in planting in layers, trying new spacing etc but worry about plants competing for nutrients, abouts harvesting bwing more difficult.
I have read about milpas for example, does that mean that i plant a tomato and peas or beans and corn in the same hole essentially? Or with correct spacing but in the same area? My kids love edamame (and soy is almost always OGM yuckiness around here) and peas as snacks, and my husband loves corn on th cob which is hard to come by here (except for super starchy picked too long ago corn) so i would love to try a corn, tomato soy situation but don't know if I've correctly understood the spacing and timing and if this is the best way to profit from our sun corner or if i might just screw it all up!

I apologize for how long this is, i could go on even more, but worry that no one will ever read my posts again 😜

Thank you all, you are great!

I would also note that you are talking about annual plants, here, so there isn't a lot of commitment by planting them however.  You can easily change it next year, once you've had a chance to digest all of the new information and make a plan.  Planning is more of an issue with trees and perennial plants, since moving them can be a real hassle.  Even with that, if the choice is between a poor plan and not planting at all, I tend towards just planting things and figuring the rest out later, but I may very well be in the minority with that opinion.  On that note, I'm off to dig up a patch of grass to plant some perennials that I ordered with no plan whatsoever :)

For some plant combinations--like the corn/bean/squash combo called "Three Sisters"--the plants can be planted a bit closer together because they take up different nutrients. But, you still don't want them in the same hole. With spinach growing next to peas, for example, you'd want to space them far enough that there's room for each plant as they grow, but they don't need to be in separate holes. Since a lot of my seeds don't always sprout, I just plant them and see what sprouts and thin/harvest any plant that's growing too close to another one.

When I do a quick planting, I watch the seeds come up. If there's, say, a beet growing right next to a carrot, I just thin out the one I don't want. So, I spend more time thinning, but less time planting. Which works for me, because I'm just happy something grew!