Planning your ideal kitchen garden requires some skills in landscape design, but these should be easy for most gardeners to master. You can start with a book on the subject to provide useful tips as well as delicious recipes, such as The Complete Kitchen Garden by Ellen Ogden.

This book offers a choice of 14 garden design plans which can suit a wide range of backyard sizes and gardener preferences. Some of these designs include a classic country garden, a chef's garden and a salad lover's garden. Ogden's premise in the book is that great gardens start with good design. She believes that vegetable gardens can be beautiful as well as functional, so the plans in her book redesign the standard vegetable garden to include pathways and unique uses of space, in addition to practical advice on selecting the perfect soil and deciding what type of beds to use.

The winner of the Tuscon Metropolitan Xeriscape Contest in Arizona this year proves that it's possible to have landscape designs that incorporate some high-irrigation elements but still use water responsibly.

A design from River Road Designs took the top honor for incorporating a small orchard and English garden into an overall desert landscape. The efforts to save water elsewhere in the landscape allowed for the addition of a few water intensive features. The orchard is small, but includes apricot, fig, mandarin, pomegranate, lime, grapefruit and lemon trees adjacent to a vegetable garden. The English garden is also small, and has its own dedicated water line to efficiently water the area without wasting any water on the surrounding desert plants that don't need it. These include many unique specimens of yuccas, agaves, desert bushes and cacti.

New Hampshire State Police have warned the local people of the Shelburne area of New Hampshire about a landscaping scam. It has been reported that a landscaping scammer has been running operations in the area, and Shelburne residents were told to be on the lookout. The landscaping scam was identified after many residents reported to be cheated in the past couple of weeks. The culprits, posing as individual freelancers or representatives of a company approach residents and offer to do landscaping work. They take the payment in advance and then disappear with the money, leaving citizens waiting, and exasperated. Residents have been advised against making any advance payments, and have also been told to report to the state police if they notice any of the landscaping scammers in operation.