Water, weed and wait.

That’s all I seem to be doing these days.

I blame the weather.

April saw me planting “cold-weather” crops, most of which fizzled.

May was perfect for tucking in perennials and not much else as temperatures hovered around the nippy mark.

June began with threat of frost and delayed my sowing of the vegetable garden.

July has been torture as I have eyed the vegetable patch and counted then recounted the number of days between sowing a seed and reasonably expecting the first blossom.

I’ve endured week after week of biting mosquitoes, two – yes, two – cursed snakes slithering everywhere, and now the Japanese beetles have arrived, hot on the tail of the cucumber beetles.

All I’ve harvested are onions, purslane, celery and herbs.

So I water, weed and wait, and as I do, I see the changes a handful of days makes. The blossoms have started on the squash, tiny melons are on the cantaloupes, and I am close to having a green pepper to harvest. The snow peas are in bloom and the bush beans are developing flowers. The tomatoes are fruiting and the cucumbers are starting runners. There’s even a bud forming on one of the artichoke plants.

When it rains, it will pour, won’t it?

Meanwhile, I am admiring the rogue plants that sprouted long before I ever dropped a seed this spring. The winterlong blanket of snow that fell on ground that didn’t freeze is probably the only reason I have so many returning performers this summer. The list is extensive and includes one plant I never expected would make it through a Maine winter.

Borage dots the garden top to bottom. I have plants growing in places that never had borage before, and all of the rogue plants are sturdier and healthier than any plant I sowed. Nothing quite compares to the blue of a borage flower. And a host of borage flowers drives the bees wild. It’s one of the best plants I know of to attract pollinators to the garden, with a clump abuzz from dawn till dusk.

A relative of Borago officinalis also sprouted this year, but one plant underwent a transformation. Echium vulgare, or viper’s bugloss, is in the same family as borage, with the striking blue of borage nearly matched in echium. The difference is that echium falls more to the purple, then changes to pink and finally bleaches out to white as the flowers mature.

I had a vigorous patch of echium last year and was surprised to see a clump of pure white on the edge of the garden this month. There is a white strain of echium available from some seed companies, but I never expected to get it by chance when the plants reseeded. I also have a couple of deep blue echiums in bloom, their shades seemingly a darker hue than what I remember having last summer.

A robust number of curly mallow plants also sprang up around the vegetable patch. I still couldn’t get seed for this variety, but I had saved a couple hundred seeds from last year’s crop and planted many of those. Curly mallow makes a striking ornamental (last year’s plants were well over 6 feet tall), but its delicately ruffled leaves are edible as a salad green and make elegant garnishes.

Even Japanese beetles like it.

A clump of unknown sunflowers is nearly ready to burst as they top the 6-foot mark. Winding around them is a plant or two of morning glory, something else that has never reseeded itself in any of my gardens.

A few vegetable seeds made it through the winter. As always, a nameless squash variety appeared and threatened to take over several rows of less aggressive plants. Let’s just say I nipped that in the bud this past weekend and discovered some things I had forgotten I planted. The only surviving squash plants were ones that actually had a squash on them. The wannabes are history.

Some little potatoes left in the ground last fall shot up this spring. I’ve never had that happen before and attribute it to the mild winter. The only good thing the plants seem to be doing is attracting bugs away from my two rows of potatoes, which are blooming furiously.

I’ve even got a couple of tomato plants growing in my flower section.

While I am astounded that all of these plants came from last year’s seed, I am flabbergasted by the appearance of about a dozen plants that are winter hardy only in places several hours south of here.

I’m talking about gladiolus.

Some of the bulbs ended up staying in the ground after they broke off from the foliage when I was yanking them out last fall. I had decided to toss the bulbs because their performance was lousy. Plus, the bulbs were several years old.

The pulled bulbs went on the dead plant heap and the few obstinate bulbs stayed all winter in the cozy ground.

They sprang forth in May, just days before the garden was plowed. I nearly toppled over as I bent to inspect the odd spikes coming up.

I dug up all I could find, then replanted once the plowing was done.

I’ve watered and weeded them. For the flowers, I still wait.

Janine Pineo is a NEWS systems editor. Her e-mail is jpineo@bangordailynews.net.