1. A good garden plan involves more mulching and less hoeing. Mulching with leaves, straw, sawdust, or garden compost lessens much maintenance. Mulching will pay 500% in saving labor, holding moisture, and keeping down weeds.

Also let rich land and plenty of natural organic fertilizer (really abundant fertilizer) give you more vegetables with less work than poorer land or less fertilizer would provide.

2. Get the man of the house to do more garden work. When I was growing up, some man said this is the secret of successful gardening? "Never plant more than your wife can cultivate!" Nowadays, however, wives are smarter. They not only get the man to help in cultivating the good garden, but have come to insist in this practice.

3. Grow an abundance of vegetables to make the family healthy. Now we know we can't be healthy without them. Fresh vegetables well cooked certainly taste better than a doctor's prescription and cost less. Simply as an example of a good garden, here are 18 such vegetables.

a) For vitamins A and C: leafy and yellow vegetables such as turnip an mustard greens, collards, kale, broccoli, spinach, cantaloupes.

b) For more vitamin A: sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkins, winter-type squash, Swiss chard.

c) For more vitamin C: tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, Chinese cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi.

Let's not forget canning and freezing for off-season or year round use. Let's not make this a matter of merely preserving "surplus" produce but let's plan and plant a good garden that will provide enough for this purpose.

No meal is complete without the right herbs and spices. When planning your garden don't forget to include an area for this purpose. You might want to consider a patio or indoor herb gardens in order to have easy access to fresh cooking herbs.

4. Think of growing a good garden as an adventure by constantly trying on new vegetables, new varieties, new methods of cooking.

5. Have the garden near the house. The nearer it is, the fewer steps one has to take. Make the garden so pretty you won't mind having it near the house.

6. Get the kids interested. In addition to growing vegetables for the whole family, let's have plenty of watermelons and cantaloupes for the kids (as well as older ones).

It helps to have melon to share with friends and neighbors every time they drop in all summer long!