Review: Mud and Bloom Box.

As you know I love crafts and trying to get outdoors more with Tiny especially as we live somewhere so beautiful. I also love getting things in the post so I was delighted to be gifted the new Mud and Bloom subscription box.

The Mud and Bloom Box is a monthly nature and gardening activity box aimed at 3 to 8 year olds. The idea is all about connecting children to nature with seasonal gardening and crafting activities.

I love this idea and I’ve never seen anything like it.  There are any number of crafting subscriptions but I’ve not come across Mud and Bloom’s unique mix of crafting, gardening and nature activities before.

Something which also helps the Mud and Bloom box stand out for me is that it isn’t packed full of plastic and single use items. You can do many of the activities more than once now that you’ve got the inspiration and the handy instructions. The box and its contents are recyclable too.

The box is aimed at 3 to 8 year olds and as Tiny is only 2 I took the lead with a lot of the activities but it was still really fun to involve her with new things.  I even did the bird spotting activity with my 8 year old niece.  This is definitely something I’d like to invest in as she gets older because we’re not able to attend the local forest school and I think this is a nice alternative.

The first activity we did was making the twig boat.  Tiny helped me gather twigs in the park.

Then one Friday evening whilst dinner was cooking we sat down with Daddy to make our boats. This was lovely in itself as we don’t often get to craft with Daddy.

The instructions were really straightforward and it didn’t take us long to create two boats. You can do this activity over and over again as the main requirement is twigs!

We wanted to sail both our boats together at the beach but haven’t managed it yet. The plan was to go after our Parkrun on Saturday but the sea was too rough.

So instead one of our boats had its maiden voyage in the bath!

Next we had a go at the sprouting seeds. I was quite dubious about this activity because of my complete lack of green fingers but the instructions were easy to follow and our beans sprouted in four days! Tiny was intrigued by the increase in the size of the beans every time we looked at them and enjoyed getting very wet whenever we rinsed them.

The beans were well and truly sprouted by Saturday night and Hubby and I started snacking on them whilst we made dinner.  I’m amazed by how tasty they are. Some of them remind me of fresh peas… one of my favourite things.  I never would have thought of doing anything like this without the Mud and Bloom box.

Finally we had a go at growing an avocado plant, another activity that you can try whenever you eat an avocado! This is more of a long term project as it takes 2 to 6 weeks for the pits to sprout.

The box has a good mix of instant gratification and long term projects which is nice and keeps the box going throughout the month.

Alongside these 3 activities the box also comes with some nature news for January, a checklist for January’s birds and a quiz – all of which are great for older children. So as well as the crafting and gardening activities there is also an educational aspect which I love as a teacher.  I’m hopeless with bird spotting so I learnt something too and it’s nice to have a reminder sheet about what sort of things are happening in nature at this time of year.

All in all I think the Mud and Bloom Box is a great addition to the subscription box market. It’s unique, and contains a good mix of creative and gardening activities. It involves children in nature and helps to get them outdoors. It’s also educational in a way that many similar boxes are not. You can subscribe for £7.95 a month and start your Mud and Bloom adventure.

 

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