Still trying to get my head around plant succession

I have no business being up this late at night -- but I got started on trying to come up with a garden plan/planting schedule and I just couldn't let go.  I have been doing my research and I found Growing Vegetables by Solomon really helped me conceive of time.  He says to consider your garden as two gardens: one planted with spring/fall crops and one with summer/winter cover crops.  That made sense -- so I started trying to divy my seeds up into these categories and remembered how I thought about growing edibles two years ago and decided it was way too complicated to attempt.  So I turned to the slimmer guide, Maritime NW Garden Guide by Seattle Tilth.  I paged through month by month and made a chart with my veggies and their planting schedule.  It looked like this (C stands for cloched, O for outdoors, I for indoors):

My perusal taught me two additional things about garden planning timing.  One, you switch to summer varieties between April and May.  Two, you switch to fall and winter varieties between June and July.  A bit too complicated for this year's plan -- but good to know. 

Time was starting to make sense, but I couldn't get the swing of how it was going to work in the garden.  So I opened up a word document, created a table the shape of my raised bed, copied it eight times, and labeled each for a month between March and October (I figure February is a lost cause around here -- better to admit defeat and get started next month.) 

 

My charts looked like this (I have no idea why I couldn't just do a screen grab -- I had to photograph my computer?!)  I used dark shading for the spaces I was saving for summer crops, white shading for new plantings, and medium shading for existing plants.  It made a lot of sense until about three months in.  Who knew plant succession was so hard!

And now I have to cry uncle so this scaredy cat farmer get some sleep.  I will try again on Monday.

Planning for crop rotation and succession starting

Perhaps it was the drizzle (and hail) or the start of the Olympics or the fact that we were together as a family for the first time in a week -- but we didn't get anything done in the yard this weekend.  The most I could muster was a planning session in a bowling alley parking lot while my daughter attended a birthday party.

Yes, I settled in with Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades and The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide and tried to wrap my head around two concepts: crop rotation and succession planting.  Crop rotation is the practice of moving types of plants (leaf, root, fruit, cover, flower) around in one's garden so their common pests are undermined and the soil is replenished by the growing process itself.  Succession planting is a means to make good use of small spaces by removing one plant from the garden after it bears veggies and replacing it with another whose season is just starting. 

I can think in three dimensions.  I understand that each plant will require a certain amount of space (length, depth, and height) to mature.  But add time, and I am sunk -- particularly since crop rotation requires that you think in years and succession planting requires that you think in the life cycle of particular plants. 

I am hoping that thinking in four dimensions will come easier with experience but for now I am going to have to do more research.  Maybe I will be able to make sense of this if I start by listing seeds by crop type in order to make a basic layout -- then layer on the successions afterwards.  It seems like it would be much easier if I had more than two beds to work with but that fix isn't in the cards.

Any advice on being able to plan in four dimensions out there?