Over this wonderful four day weekend I managed to get a handle on a number of gardening and house projects that I didn't really have a good feel on what was needed. I finally got around to removing the dead arbor vitae but in place of cutting them down I managed to push them over and I'm planning on mounting them upside down in the garden and use them as a bean and pea trellis. In other bean related news I discovered/noticed that the fava beans I planted next to the garage are doing wonderful and I'm thinking about giving away the rose bushes to make room for more fava beans.

I finally figured out why the back porch was leaking and managed to get away from the hornets while scampering from oneside of the roof to the other. The back porch has a fairly strange design and I haven't yet figured how what they were thinking. They built it on a cement pad with untreated wood and the have this funky strip of foam between the hanger mounted where the gutter would usually be and the corrugated sheet metal which makes up the porch roof. The problem is the foam has broken down so whenever enough pine needles build up on the porch roof water overtops the foam and leaks down onto the cement pad. Of course you can't easily get at the foam because of a foot wide strip of sheetmetal that covers the funky strip of foam that is partially under the roof tiles. So you have to lay down on the roof of my house and then pull up the strip of sheet metal to see the foam and this is about the time I discovered the hornet's nest.