Make Tumbled Sea Glass Garden Mulch

when we were doing our flowerbeds we wanted something a little different so we went for a tumbled glass mulch now this is something you can buy but it's really simple to make it and all you need is glass and a cement mixer when it comes to finding glass your cement mixer won't be picky you can you can get it from most any source a lot of ours comes from windows contact a glass replacement company and ask them if they'll let you buy some of the windows they've removed most the times I'll just give them to you ours did so we would get as much as we want it now we do like the curved glass just it's a neat visual effect so we will fill the flowerbeds with a lot of the flat plate glass and then we'll sprinkle some curved stuff on top but honestly you can use just about anything when it comes to filling the mixer it's really important to fill your mixer up if you let your mixer tumble mostly empty you will be left with glass powder there'll be nothing that will survive so it's got to have some volume there if you're dealing with broken glass about 8 gallons or two 5-gallon buckets this while volume-wise quite a bit more once it shatters down it'll all be taken care of and you don't have to worry about your mixer shattering stuff it'll break it don't don't you worry a bit about that the next step is to add water about a gallon and a half do not tumble your glass dry it'll produce a nasty nasty powdery dust so you want to get a little water in there but not too much because that'll cut down on the grinding action so a gallon and a half or so is about right I speed things along with a little bit of rock tumbler grit available at any hobby store and a couple of tablespoons of the coarsest stuff you can find pretty hard on your mixer though the noise this makes while turning is biblical it is a hellacious noise so you want to take care not to your teach your neighbors by wrapping the drum in that old blanket I've dramatically cut down how much sound gets out most of the sound however comes out the mouth so what i've done is i've made a cover plate that fits in there and that probably cut the noise by a quarter all on its own so you want to cover the nose somehow just for fun ah i'll let you hear what it sounds like when it tumbles without the cover in place here it goes you might have also noticed the cover is kind of essential to keep the bits and pieces from flying out so as you can see it's already been a little hard on the glass some bits have broken up so next step and this is this is where your neighbors will get irritated the next step is to cover it turn it on and let it run for about eight hours eight to ten hours so I'll fire this bad boy up and we'll rejoin the action later this afternoon so here we are at the end of ten hours of tumbling as you can see everything is been reduced so now what you need to do is flush the drum and flushing the drum is really very very simple simply drain it fill it full water tumble it drain it fill up a water tumble drain it do that mmm four or five times until the stuff starts coming out relatively clear and then bring out all of your glass into buckets because it's going to have to be screened you don't want all the glass sand in your flowerbeds defeats the purpose so everything in there you need to kind of flush out the glass powder what it looks like talcum powder won't hurt you I don't mind in the garden and then then we need to take all that material and sift it with water so first step flush some more get it in buckets cleaning the glass is very very simple you just need a couple of bits and pieces first I have a screen this happens to be 8 inch if you want larger chunks just use a bigger screen I have my bucket of unwashed I have a bucket for the wash and then that nasty white one over there that's just for the garbage the sticks the the rocks the bottle caps the the various things that are in these bottles pipe cleaners stuff like that that inevitably will come out in your glass you just got to throw it away when you go to clean it you need a tub of water you just pour some glass in and shake it out this is a great time to pick out anything that you don't want in there that's all there is to it this is really kind of a fun project to do with the whole family so great way to recycle good luck with your garden thanks for watching you

Channel: NelsonStudios

Views: 94,408

Rating: 4.8342667 out of 5

Keywords: Glass (Material In Fiction), Material (Literature Subject), cement, mixer, craft, idea, ideas, weed, weeds, mulch, mulching, decorate, decorative, Green, Smashing, Flowers, Flower, Making, Garden, Eco, Environment, Nature, Gardens, Gardening, Earth, Friendly, Organic, Water, Environmental, weeding, Sustainable, Eden, Showdown, Recycling (Industry), earth, instructable, prize, win, Contest, Entry, diy, hint, tip, Do It Yourself (Website Category), Help, Tips, Tutorial, Need, Tricks, Howto, Please, Learn, Free, cool

Id: q2JzknRLJzY

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2012