Mud & Bloom Subscription Box – Four Months On | Review

Back at the start of the year, I made a decision that the house would try and do more activities away from screens. There were a lot of reasons why we decided to make a move – the adults of the house both work in games, and work from home, so a lot of our time is spent working in front of monitors, but that is very much a situation we have chosen ourselves. As we work in games we always have something new for the kids to watch or play with, and it’s certainly nice (for me) to have them share a hobby with me. However, they came to expect it, and they came to be very reluctant to move away from the screen. I would suggest we go to play in the garden and be met with grumbles!

So, we took to the road more often, saw more sights. We got a new printer so we could print more stuff off and then… well, Covid-19 happened and all of a sudden there was more time (and we needed the printer) and the way that the day worked changed. We also couldn’t get out to the same places in the same way, uh oh!

As a result of that, we decided to try out a few of the subscription boxes aimed at children that are available. We tried science boxes and history boxes, but perhaps most successfully we tried one of the various nature boxes: Mud and Bloom. As a matter of fact, we’ve just wrapped up our fourth month on it now.

The four months have been great, and we’re lucky enough to live near a generous (and populous) pond and woodland, so we’ve been able to do most if not all of the activities over the four months. Every month has had us set out into the ‘wilderness’ collecting sticks, leaves, or flowers in order to make something out of them back at home. The kids have built boats, picture frames, journey sticks and more, they’ve also planted radishes, beans and basil (on the food front), and Nasturtiums, Echinacea and plenty of other flowers that the kids struggle to pronounce.

It’s a really great little subscription box, and unlike some of the other ones available out there you are left with tangible things which can persist in the garden and really brighten up the house and garden every day. This isn’t some quick burn and forget box. On that note, it contains little soil packets as well as the seeds – there’s actually very little which you need to do (beyond the scavenger hunt for twigs, etc) in order to have everything together to get started. The sibling box, which we’ve been getting, has (almost) enough in there to cover the three children too. In addition to this, there are quizzes and lovely little fact-files about what nature is currently up to that month.

I can’t really detail the reason why we’ve stopped doing the boxes (hopefully we’ll return to them in future), but I do want to take a little moment to expand on some of our favourite activities from the four months we’ve been doing it in:

My personal favourite came quite recently: we eat a LOT of pesto and cook a lot of Italian-style meals, so this month’s basil seeds are going to be incredibly useful when they reach full growth. For Jupiter, it was making a Sun Catcher. She had never made these before – you press plants then put them between tissue and then place them up on a high window – and was really impressed with them.

For Robin, her favourite thing was making the candle-jars. The activity had us use twine to make a hanging stream for an old jam jar, we then stuck coloured tissue to the side so that when we lit the candle within all of the colours danced across the walls. Amelia really enjoyed the journey stick – finding a large stick in the woods and stringing other things from the walk onto it – while Kai was enamoured with designing and making his own twig raft complete with a sail.

There’s a lot of good reasons to get the Mud & Bloom box, but I think the most important one is that it is a fantastic reminder of all of the potential activities which are around us at any given point in time. That and we’ve now got plenty of veggies and flower-varieties growing in our garden!

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