How to make a really simple mud kitchen

One of the biggest challenges I face in the garden is not slugs eating dahlia shoots or foxes lounging in the ammi. It’s getting my children outside to play. After a really lovely weekend in Somerset playing in someone else’s garden, we were inspired to give an unloved corner of the garden a makeover and build ourselves a really easy mud kitchen.

Keen to use up what we already had, I used two palettes and some old bricks to put together this mud kitchen. As space was tight I didn’t want to use the full depth of the pallets so went three planks deep with the smaller one and sawed the larger of the two in half, giving me three sections to work with. As this part of the garden is on a slope I added some bricks to level the ground with the edge of an existing raised bed and then layered two sections on top of each other and added the smallest piece to the front to keep it stable.

After scouring the garden for containers, I gave everything a good clean and set up the area with flowers, water and soil. We also added a rope swing to the branch of the tree which gives them something extra to play with. All we need now is some warm weather and I hope we’ll be playing out there all summer long.