It looks like today's rain will amount to something.

We got 0.15 inch about a week ago and 0.20 Sunday night to Monday morning, and while that is better than nothing it is not enough. Part of what is irritating is that we were at Barre, Vt., over the weekend, and it rained hard. I could picture that coming to Portland, but it just never happened.

But it it was raining when I woke up about 4 a.m. today – I did make it back to sleep for a little while after that – and it has been raining pretty hard ever since. We have followed this storm with emails from Rhode Island and a rainout in Boston. And now it is finally here.

We are just beginning to get tomatoes, and that is good. We have been buying them from our local farm stands for a couple of weeks now, but it is nice to have them free from our own plants.

One oddity from this year is that we are getting an awful lot of yellow summer squash, quite a bit of a yellow zucchini with just a bit of green on the end and almost no green zucchini and cucumbers. We have gotten a few, but not a lot. The winter squash and melons seem to be coming along OK.

No pictures today. I will get some over the weekend, when we are staying home and with no guests, which should give us quite a bit of free time for getting the gardens in shape and taking some photos.

My column on Sunday was about O'Donal's Nursery in Gorham buying the rights to Barth Daylilies, which is said to be the longest continuous line of daylily hybridizing in the country. Nancy and I have some of the plants – purchased in the 1980s – and like them a lot.

About the Author

Tom Atwell has written the Maine Gardener column in the Maine Sunday Telegram since the spring of 2004. He has worked at the Press Herald/Sunday Telegram since 1974, about the same time he started gardening with any seriousness.

He gardens with his wife, Nancy. She not only is the better gardener of the pair, but also knows the botanical names of plants. They have two grown children and four grandchildren.

Tom was born in Skowhegan, grew up in Farmington and graduated from the University of Maine with a BA in journalism. His goal each year is to have continuous compost from his three compost bins, continuous bloom in his low-maintenance garden and more fruits and vegetables on his family table than the garden pests eat in the field.

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