Soil: If you live where the soil is already dark and loamy, lucky you. If not, buy a bag or two of compost and work it into the soil (you can do this with a hoe pretty quickly).

Super shortcut for busy mamas: Buy bags of organic topsoil. Place them where you want to start gardening, cut open the bag and start planting directly into the pile of soil (you can trim off the plastic flaps of the bag or mulch over them). Only do this with flowers.

Satisfyingly simple flowers, herbs and veggies: Start these flowers from seed: sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, calendula, love-in-a-mist, bachelor's buttons and nasturtiums. Veggies : summer squash and pole beans. Buy tomatoes (cherry tomatoes are simplest to cultivate and most satisfying for children to harvest) as starter plants. Easy-peasy, I promise!

Give them something to climb up: No, no, no—not your little ones, the beans and the tomatoes. Use terracotta pots as a base for your fencing (see photo above). Feed bamboo stakes through and push deep into the soil. Sometimes, I jam additional, smaller pieces of the bamboo into the opening of the terracotta pot, to really stabilize it. Create horizontal supports with additional bamboo and florist wire wrapped around at meeting points.

Foil unwanted garden guests: I have been busy constructing very simple "fences" to foil our ever-so-cute yet pesky border collie/basset hound Otis. Same set-up as the trellis, but this time thread deer netting around the stakes. This fencing can be made in less than five minutes, on the fly and on the cheap. Oh, yes. The winds howl through Sugar Hollow and these remain steadfast.

Watering: Try to water in the evenings or the early morning (mid-day stresses the plants). This can be a fun time for you and your children to notice each and every new thing that is happening in the garden. Kids are really, really good at watering—embrace this chore as water play, too. Also, mulching around the plants with compost or bark mulch will keep things tidy and cut back on how often you need to water.

Feed them (the plants): If you can, offer your new plants compost tea or some organic fertilizer every two weeks or so.

Feed them (the kids): If you are doing battle with your toddler over vegetables at the table, bring them to the garden. Something that will be summarily rejected during mealtime becomes highly desirable when they can pick it and eat it right away. Last night, Willa feasted on sugar snap peas. That’s a vegetable serving. That’s a victory!