Recently I’ve been lamenting the state of our garden – when we moved in we had grass and lots of plants and then Made’s stupid ducks ate everything and now we just have a big patch of dirt and whenever anything green tries to grow again, Made’s stupid chickens peck it to death or Kiran hits it with a stick to achieve the same thing.

Ugly as it is, it hasn’t made much difference to the kids and Kiran especially likes digging in the dirt and it’s pretty much the only thing that will keep him occupied for longer than 5 minutes. Also now we’re kind of back to basics I’m coming up with some more ideas for making it more fun for them to play in like I wanted to when we moved in and never quite got around to. Our rental agreement is due for renewal and there was a bit of a wobble for a while over our rent possibly going up and maybe having to move back into the family home in the village but i’m pretty sure we’re going to be here for at least another year so I have renewed enthusiasm for renovations.

I love the kids playing in the garden for 2 main reasons:

1. I think it’s incredibly important for young kids to spend time playing outdoors. My mum was involved in a forest schools pilot in the UK years ago and since then I’ve done a lot of reading and the argument for letting kids just play all day in the dirt instead of trying to teach them anything until they’re at least 6 or 7 is quite compelling.

2. It keeps them busy – they’ll happily entertain themselves out there for much longer than doing anything inside and it gives me chance to get some work done without guilt.

So I’ve been looking into a few ideas for how I can make our outdoor space more fun. At the moment all we basically have is a load of container and plastic cutlery for ‘mud cooking’. I just claimed back the little bamboo roof thing that was here when we moved in as a makeshift playhouse but I’d really like to make something better.

One of Maya’s friends has an amazing bamboo fort in their garden, I haven’t got a photo of it but it’s similar to this one (only bigger and better!):

We don’t have room for a playhouse like this (well we probably do but it would take up the whole space!) but it would probably be pretty easy and cheap to get a small bamboo playhouse made up here so I’ve been looking for inspiration:

Ok not bamboo but these willow playhouses are beautiful, but £2,000 plus delivery? Yikes? They do sell similar things here for nowhere near that price but still too pricey for me to want to leave it open to the elements. It’s my dream to one day own a house big enough for a little rattan reading nook like this.

This is a clever idea and I wanted to make a sandpit too, so why not combine them? It would be pretty easy to make in bamboo.

Again, this one is not actually bamboo (having a hard time finding many examples of bamboo playhouses actually) but would be pretty easy to replicate – look at the roof! What a cool idea.

Ok not technically a house, but that giant bamboo ball is pretty cool. Also I think I may have just discovered a new favourite blog – I mean anyone who has this in their back yard must have an amazing blog, right? Check it out.

And of course a good old bamboo teepee is always an option – I love this outdoor play space  – it’s simple but just perfect I think. Teepee, mud kitchen and sand pit with tree stumps – what more could a little kid want?

And I had to sneak in a picture of Sharma Springs here at the end. Sharma Springs is an amazing designer villa near us that’s built entirely from bamboo and looks like something out of a dream. It was designed and built by the same team behind Green School and it’s in a whole village of impressive bamboo houses at Green Village. If I was rich, I’d get Ibuku to build my kids’ playhouse… (that sounds odd as “ibuku” means my mother in Indonesian)