Check my web site to see what I did with broken brick. Go all the way to the bottom of the page under my introduction and click on updating photos. It will be about the 3rd pic over in that section. You will see all the paths I did around my pond with all the broken bricks. I had all of these left over from the families old homeplace. It was the chimneys bricks. lol Anyway I had to dig them out of the soil where they were piled many many years ago and then had to knock off the old cement they were put together with. So I wound up breaking some of them and this is what I used the rest for. I made the walkway out of the others that were whole and I actually like the brokens ones the best believe it or not. Just keep clicking on more of the process until you get to about the 3rd page over in the updating photos and you will see all the paths. Here is a link that might be useful: Ponding site

These are all great ideas and questions, as has been stated before go to Garden Accoutrements and to Garden Junk forums on this site, both great forums. I go to aboute 20 forums on a regular basis here at garden web and the home site, take a real good look at the lists. Hope youall finds some answers. Lindag

If you want a day trip there is a hugh place in Hempstead, Texas. I do not remember the name but not hard to find because Hempstead is a small place. It is on Hwy6 and 290 about 80 miles north of Houston, 100 miles south of Austin and 120 south of Waco. All of these miles are a lose appox. I know thee is a web site and should be easy to find. We have had a large fountain for years and keep it on a lot. For fun and dinner parties you can add food color to the water and change the water color. A lot of fun at night. My DH takes care of our. He uses the water hose and a spray nozzle to keep it clean. Sometimes he will had household bleach if it gets real yucky. Hope this helps.

Wasps are very beneficial -- unless you are raising butterly caterpillars. Their sole food is caterpillars. Malcome Beck tells a story about a man who had a pecan orchard. His nephew came and spent the summer and for entertainment with a sling shot he knocked down all the paper wasps nests he could find. The man was plagued by tent caterpillars on his pecan trees for years afterward until the wasps were able to restore their numbers. Even though I have plants for the butterflies to use as food for their larva I let the paper wasps stay. There are enough caterpillars from other sources to keep them going and they don't take too many butterfly babies. Paper wasps are very non-agressive and I can reach near their nests, but they don't sting unless I inadvertently bump the nest. My wasps have come to recognize me, they are the genuises of the insect world, and even if I do bump the nest they just give me a little warning buzz fly by, or at most a tiny sting, so tiny I don't even bother putting anything on it. I've had huge nests hanging right over the patio door where people go in and out all the time and the wasps never pay them any mind. Now the big red wasps are a different matter. They like to nest in cavities like empty decorative bird houses in the eaves of the house and are more agressive. They are more likely to sting if you walk close by. Muddaubers are related to wasps and are very VERY non agressive. They are solitary nesters and don't nest in a group like paper wasps. You can be touching their mud nest and they do nothing. If you caught one in your hand and held it they might sting of course. The sole food of muddaubers are spiders which they collect and pack into the cells of their mud houses (which look like tiny pueblos to me) and lay a egg on them. They then seal the chamber and the larve feed on the spiders. Malcome Beck said he opened many nests and found 90 percent of the spiders contained in them were black widow spiders. Of course it depends on your population of spiders. I have found many spiders in the nest when I used to open them as a child that I had never seen before in the garden. While I like garden spiders -- they do their job in the garden also by catching insects, I appreciate that nature keeps bug populations in better balance than I could by using insecticides or knocking down wasp and muddaubers nests. I would never have believed it possible, but I have had no damaging insect problems since I stopped using insecticides. There are other types of wasps, some that nest in the ground that look like bees. I can stand and walk by the hole where they are coming and going and they never pay any attention. Neither do the large cicada killers. There may be some other agressive wasps, but I don't know about them. As to bees, which are the subject of this thread, they are very non-agressive when foraging away from the hive -- whether honey bees, bumble bees or other wild bees. I get right in the middle of them while they are working the flowers to take pictures and they just get out of the way. Happy gardening the natural way.