Termites Suck, er chew...

So last week sometime I discovered our shed is getting eaten from the ground up by termites. (That certainly explains why it seems to be sinking.) That find led me to wander about the yard to see what else might be getting eaten. They've munched half the bottom row of the pond timbers. The actual garden beds seem to be fine, but they do all have pretty bad wood rot. (Which happens when you build out of cheap pine rather then rot resistant wood.) I have one raised bed to replace completely and others to phase out. The deep one near the house is getting demolished to keep any termites from getting ideas. The shorter ones near the house I'm not sure what I'm doing with yet. Since I now have to rip up and move or replace most of the beds in the yard my eye turned toward reorganizing. The current design was caused by fencing the yard in sections rather then connecting it all together.

My new plan:

This is only a plan of the currently fenced garden area I have to work with. A large chunk of the yard off to the right and above this plot is devoted to the dogs with very little except wood chips. Some of this depends on whether we can get the huge trees thinned that now shadow the yard. My mother is on a local food kick right now and devoting more space to food and getting some light into the garden can let us actually grow some stuff I might eat too. I really want to do more grapes (our reliance vine gave us grapes this year, which were okay, but I really want green table grapes) and cantaloupe melons. Mom really likes tomatoes, lettuce and watermelons. Right now we can sort of grow lettuce, green beans, peas and a few other veggies, but not well. We had two years of great tomatoes a few years back when the trees have been limbed up. I'm hoping at minimum to have them trimmed, the one closest the house seems to be dying however and may be completely removed.

Obviously the above plan would be more useful to other people if they had the current layout. I'm actually quite embarrassed by what it looks like now, so just believe me that it would be a better use of the space I have. I have tall plants growing south of short plants, lots of stuff is sort of on top of other stuff, and I let the weeds take over in a few sections.