The New York Times offers a column here by Stephen Orr on the overall feeding of container gardens - the Gimpy Girls’ favorite way to garden.

The ability to start a new crop of something several times in one gardening season is a favorite reason for loving container gardens.

Right now, for example, several metal buckets that have been growing salad mixes for two months are about to be emptied and planted with purple kale and ornamental cabbage that will grow through the first frosts.

(Not that we want to think about frosts right now with the tomatoes ripening and cucumbers popping out all over.)

Many of our garden containers grow edible plants doing double-time as patio centerpieces.

We plant a succession of “salad bowls” every couple of weeks to keep them coming through the summer. It makes it easier to hack down this beautiful stuff for dinner if we know more is on the way.

We have an extensive garden where everything is grown in raised wood beds or in containers, as shown here with this lovely Globe Zucchini in flower.

The Globe variety tastes the same as most other zucchini but its round shape is a departure from the abundantly procreative zeppelin-shaped zucchini that consumes the backyard in late summer.

The Globe variety, in our opinion, is much cuter!

Raised wood garden beds are a boon for people with physical limitations. Yes, most of us need to find someone to build them, but their fairly simple construction won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

The Web has many sites that tell you how to build them but we like the two named below, especially the one that suggests putting leaves in a garbage can and zapping them with a string cutter to speed their rotting time.

Click here and here to read the articles. Click here to watch a video of Paul James building the bed. It’s Video No. 4 in the Gardening By The Yard series.

Eds. Note: This being a Web site for people with disabilities, I’m torn about my costing an “arm and a leg” comment. I find it utterly inappropriate and spot on at the same time.

Last year, we planted a raised bed with a brand of asparagus called Purple Passon that we ordered bare-root from one of our favorite nurseries - Nourse Farms.

The bare-roots arrived big and healthy and took right off - sending up many stalks during the summer. To establish a thriving asparagus bed, and promote root growth, you need to resist the urge to pick many of the stalks during the first and second summers, which has proven difficult indeed.

The delectable Purple Passion is so sweet, moist, crunchy and tender, it rarely makes it from garden to dinner table - we snap the stalk and eat it raw right in the garden.

If you have even a small space in your garden, plant some of these. They are hardy, easy to grow, and require little labor once the bed is planted. And the fern-like fronds are tall and gorgeous in the fall, as seen in the photo to the right taken last October after a light frost.

We had great hopes last summer for this Topsy Turvy Upside-Down Tomato Planter - marketed as an easy way to grow tomatoes, cukes and other vining vegetables.

It sounded like so much fun and turned out to be anything but. And our finished product looked NOTHING like the manufacturer’s photo pictured here. To anyone considering it, here’s our list of complaints:

* The planter was tricky to fill and very much a two-person job because the plastic top repeatedly fell down and obstructed the planter as we were filling it with soil.

* The plants, themselves, had to be very young and small to fit in the narrow hole in the bottom and it was tricky to plant without damaging them.

* Once it was filled with soil and watered, the planter became a wretchedly heavy beast - hence the prominent warnings from the manufacturer about where NOT to hang it, for it surely would rip a hook out of your fence, siding or roof overhang.

* We solved the problem by hanging it from a sturdy, old, metal hospital IV stand Cait found in someone’s trash. For 2008, the manufacturers are promoting a stand to buy with the planter that will put it at arms’ reach on any patio, though you’ll still need a strong person - or two - to help you fill and plant it.

* Last summer we planted a tomato and a cucumber and neither really flourished though we did get a tiny harvest from it. Cait has vowed to try it again this season and will let you know how it goes.