Mud kitchens - your experience

[HS1990]

Thinking about setting up a mud kitchen for my kids but not sure if I have considered all possible negative aspects of doing it ... please share your experiences.

Thanks

mine haven’t had a mud kitchen. We had a traditional sane pit (plastic hippo thing) and tuff trays. The tuff trays are constantly used. I had made stands for mine but ii should have just bought them with stands. They are sand pits. Water trays, sand and water, dino land, farm, zoo, can be used inside or outside. Can make pretend mud cakes, sand cakes, playdough. You can contain Lego and playmobil in them!
we also have a few of those black trays from garden centres that are about £5 each and they are great as well

Ours does get quite a bit of use. The only major downside is the collecting of potion ingredients from around the garden. Mainly sand from sand pit, random soil dug out of flower beds, gravel of the path, leaves & flowers, and occasionally crashed up chalk. It depends how precious you are about the rest of the garden, or how careful you intend to watch.

It does get kind of messy, but that's the idea. I just hose it down every now and then.

Ran a preschool for over 20 years and it was probably our most popular resource! We had to have a rota!

My son loves his. Can't think of anything negative about it.

What other potion ingredients do your kids like ?

I built one out of a washing up bowl, pallets, off cuts of stud timber, and plastic pipe and fittings left over from extension build. My youngest played with it everyday last summer, but grew past it quite quickly. It had water from a hose and some waste pipes running at funny angles for filling buckets. Used some 2 litre pop bottles with bottom cut off as funnels, and some old paint tubs as buckets. Wouldn't pay for one though.

Mine uses his every day in summer. It’s set up next to about so he mainly uses sand and water and leave, no actual mud. It’s pretty clean as I just brush sand off occasionally when it’s dry and put back in sand pit

Ds is now 4 and has had since he was 1, so around 3 years of use. He uses in winter also without water if it’s not raining

Get one!

my son has had his 2 years and it’s used often- it’s set up next to a patch of dirt- we wet it and he goes to town!

The item that is played with most in the garden and they are 9 and 6. They use sand, water, water with food coloring and cheap beads etc to make the potions and "food". It started off with metal utensils but they went a bit rusty so cheap plastic pots and pans are easier now. Also tiger do plastic cones and scoops that are great for an ice cream parlor using wet sand .

It's the toy that get used the most.

Mud pies. Potions. Washing up. Tea parties from the tap. They use used tea bags for the tea parties then mush them up in mud pies.

Amazing ideas thanks to all of you. I probably have enough to start a makeshift one.

How do you manage the mess from the sand? I'm always worried about it not being biodegradable ...

I'm not sure what you mean. A mud kitchen is just some wood or wooden pallets knocked together with some makeshift nobs on it to look like a toy oven and stovetop. We put a big container full of water with a hand pump in ours and a basin like a sink.

Give your kid some old pots and pans and kitchen utensils and they make mud pies and mix leaves and twigs and grass together and pretend they're cooking.

That's all there is to it.

It all either blows away when dry, washed away by rain, gets walked into the grass or disappears between the boards of the deck (there is probably a pile under there, but I can't see it). Sand isn't mandatory though, it just tends to get transferred over from the sand pit in our garden. If you already have a sand pit, you already have this problem. If you don't have a sand pit, there doesn't need to be sand.

A tidier hit in ours is some smooth rocks we collect from the beach, with fruit or other food painted on, then a couple of layers of clear varnish.

Different bottles of water, with a squeeze of poster paint or food colouring in is also a hit.

You can also make ice cubes with coloured water, then give them a bowl of warm water to melt them in. Or freeze in bigger containers, with plastic figures in the middle, to rescue.