You want your little gardener to feel good about this first endeavor, so choose vegetables and/or flowers that are almost fail-safe. Rall suggests tomatoes (try a couple different varieties), cucumbers, carrots, pumpkins, squash, and lettuce, as they are hardy and grow well in most conditions.

For flowers, Rall suggests giving cone flowers, black-eyed susans, daisies and salvia a whirl.  "These flowers are easy to grow and nice for cutting.  They're also very colorful and they bloom for a long period of time," he says. Better yet, they're perennials, so your hard work will pay off in the coming years as well. 

Look for an optimal place to put your garden, one with plenty of sun, gardens like up to six hours per day.  If space is a constraint, or lack of sun, consider a container garden.  "Some gardening centers sell big containers on wheels, like a little dolly, that you can move around to capture as much sun as possible," says Rall.

Once your plants are in (sometime around Mother's Day, after the last frost), watering should be an almost daily chore. "Water early in the morning or in the evening when it's cooler and the water doesn't evaporate as much," says Rall.  You don't need to water every day, but you do need to monitor the soil.  If the top layer is dry and crusty, time to get out the hose. 

And especially with children, keep garden safety in mind.  "Children's tools really are made just for children.  They could snap and break in tough clay conditions," Rall says. (He suggests mixing compost into the soil to make it looser.) And don't forget to wash your hands when you're through working, to rid yourselves of any bacteria from the soil.