Carmen from South Africa has sent an email asking:

What can I reuse/recycle to make attractive garden edging?

I’ve always been quite taken with the idea of wine bottles for garden edging (and an item on my long, long to-do list is to try making a raised bed on the same principle).

For a more rustic look, you should mimic the commercial bamboo edging using offcuts from local trees – sticks and branches about 2-5cm (1-2inches) in diameter that are too small to bother burning but too big for composting. If you want them all to stay in a neat line, you could nail them to a thin batten; else, just let the soil hold them in place.

I’ve seen some edging made from old ceramic tiles too but I’m not sure how they were supported – any ideas?

Any other suggestions?

Leo emailed to ask:

Hi, your website is great. I’m interested in reusing broken ceramics, terracotta tiles, stone etc. to do a floor mosaic. Do you have any advice about installing this, e.g. cheap or recyclable adhesive, mortar etc.?

The only time I’ve make a “crazy” tile mosiac, I had some normal tile adhesive and grout leftover from a project so just used that. Has anyone else used anything else?

And, while Leo doesn’t explicitly ask for it, anyone got any other advice for building such a mosiac recycling and upcycling various things?

(Photo by stay4while)

We’ve had an email from Kevin:

What can I do with broken tiles? I’ve just retiled my bathroom and was careful taking the old ones off but most of them cracked in half.

I also have some whole sample tiles that I got from the supplier from when I was choosing. I’m going to use one of the big ones as a hot dish plate in the kitchen but don’t know what to do with the smaller ones.

Following on from your trivet idea, smaller sample tiles would make good coasters or a place to rest your wooden spoon while cooking – especially if they’re pretty or nicely coloured.

Depending on their condition, the cracked ones could be used to “crazy tile” somewhere that doesn’t need to look 100% (like a storage cellar or shed) or smashed up further for a crazy mosaic effect. Offer them on Freecycle if you don’t want to do it yourseld – someone else might like the idea.

(If you fancy renovating them for reusing, I’ve used a translucent glass paint thing to paint ceramic tiles in the past – it let the original gloss of the tile shine through but it wasn’t particularly hard wearing and couldn’t handle being scrubbed clean. Other tile paint is thicker so harder wearing but it can easily look messy and a bit weird because it’s opaque and gloopy. Anyone else got any advice about this?)

Aside from that, there is always crocks for the bottom of plant pots.

Any other ideas?

(Photo by ftibor)

It’s been *slightly* windy in the UK over the past few days and there are lots of shattered slate tiles on the pavements around here.

My mum and dad, who live on the battered west coast, have spotted similar blown off tiles around them but the debris tends to be red roofing tiles rather than slate ones.

These tiles tend to be ridged or curved and around an inch thick – so not useful for all the flat things slate tiles can do, like be coasters. They’re also a rougher texture so can’t be used as mini-blackboards or anything like that.

So, presuming this is quite a common issue around the country at the moment, what can you do with blown down roofing tiles? Whole ones might be able to go back on the roof but what about broken ones?

(Photo by tome213)

I’ve been thinking about Scott’s really big piece of slate from Monday and it reminded me that I often see old slate roof tiles in skips around our estate as houses are renovated and new roofs added.

We have a slate surround and hearth for our fireplace so slate goes well in our living room but we already have some slate coasters and to be honest, we don’t use them much.

Any suggestions how else we can use the skip-dived slate tiles around the living room or elsewhere?

The tiles are flat, and usually about 30cm by 20cm and between 5mm-1cm thick (1’x9″x um, a quarter of an inch or something).

(Photo by Flo_Evans)