Neat and orderly...or not

Amongst the natural look I'm going for I also want a few neat and orderly areas. Areas where the lettuce grows in rows (because I forget what I plant) and the flowers are in a flower bed. I dreamed of creating this flower bed here for years, and I finally just got started on it. I've been putting it off because I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. You know the feeling when you've got a huge project that you need to do and you just don't know where to start? I'm feeling that a lot. Sometimes it's easy to look at a spot and I just see what it needs to be, I see the guild that I need to create, or I have ideas of what I want, but other times I look at this huge space that I'm trying to create in and I am finding it quite overwhelming. I just don't know where to start.

To help myself figure out what I need to do I sat down and I brainstormed with my husband. We talked about how last year we were really putting in the foundation of the permaculture by digging the swales and building the berms. We spent the entire summer doing that and we just barely finished before it started to rain and snow in the fall and then we moved into winter. This year I thought would be the year for planting, but I forgot what a pain the weeds are. So the more we talked about it the more we decided that the berms and the swales were the foundation of our permaculture garden, but the next step really needed to be to just lay down cardboard and wood chip over everything to cut back on the weeds. The two little guilds that I created a couple of weeks ago are so overrun with weeds already that I can hardly tell what I planted there, and I've weeded twice! So our new plan is to just lay down cardboard and wood chip over everything, and then next year after the wood chips have had a little bit of time to start breaking down and biodegrading and creating some soil that is when I will begin to build guilds and garden beds.

My plan there is to put the chickens in a spot as early as possible and have them get all of the weeds and the weed seeds and all of the bugs and everything that they can and then I will put down a big pile of healthy soil over the top of the wood chips and then I will plant in that. Honestly at this point I don't know if it's going to work. I feel like every time I've got a plan it doesn't go according to plan. If gardening is an experiment, permaculture is an even bigger experiment. I really want this to work though, I am determined to learn what I need to and get it figured out so that it does work. I just might have to change my plans every couple of months.