Sandpit pitfalls?

[StickleTick]

Until this morning, we had a swampy plastic boat-thing in the back garden leftover from last year's non-Summer. Complete with floating leaves, sand, stagnant water [which kind of gets replenished each time it rains again] and dubious pondlife, that the cat likes to drink.

The tarpaulin cover never worked, but at least I comfort myself knowing it was far too flooded for any animal to use as a loo. The question is: Will some bleach, swilling out, drying and raking sort the sand out?

It's now LOOKING quite nice, what with all the water/leaves out, and baking dry in the best bit of sun we've had in over 12 months.

I believe that kids need general dirt to keep them healthy - but, if I decide not to replace all the sand, is this taking it a bit too far for my poor 3year-old dd?

I would replace all the sand - and I am in the extreme school of 'kids need to get dirty to be kids'!

yeah, it'll be fine - think what happens to beach sand over the course of a winter!

I would replace sand. Until I realised I had nothing to put the old sand into.

This sounds silly but before we put our sandpit away last year i covered it with 2 rolls of cheap clingfilm just kept wrapping it over and tucking it under and it did keep it reasonably clean.

you could always bleach and rinse the sand if you are afraid of germs. Use hydrogen peroxide and then there is not possibility of it staying there and bleaching your kids, it decays to water within hours of being out of the bottle. You can get it from the chemists.

Wehheh, pigleto - a bleach that dissappears - that sounds like magic. Thanks. You see, it's partly the weight of the sand [we have to carry it up over three floors to the back garden, if we want to renew it].

If you want to get rid of the sand just sprinkle it over your flower boarders and it will be incorperated into the soil in no time.

A few years back I left the sand in the sandpit over winter (like you the cover didn't work well), by the next spring it was crawling with worms (and not your common garden variety) I was heaving cleaning it out! If you keep it please rake through it really well to check for signs of the horrid little creatures!