Natural & Organic Outdoor Playhouse
Now that the weather is good and you want to keep your young ones enjoying nature….why not give them a natural and organic outdoor playhouse? They will have so much more fun with something that they helped to build and can watch grow than they might with a plastic model. We made our house from Sunflowers and Morning Glory’s.
Ready? Here’s how to get started.
Building a Sunflower House
First you will need a couple of packages of Mammoth Sunflower Seeds or another variety that grows tall (8-10 feet minimum with large 10 inch flowers)
- 1 pack of Morning Glory seeds
- Other low growing, trailing flowers (optional)
- A shovel
- Some compost or planting mix and potting soil
- Children for planting seeds
- Water
To begin making your sunflower house first you need to clear an area in your lawn. You can make it as large as you like but 2 packs of sunflower seeds will cover a 6-7 foot diameter circle while having 2 seeds for every 12-16 inches to allow for thinning. Don’t clear the inside of the circle, just the perimeter.
Once you have dug up the grass, loosen the soil and then pour your compost and potting soil on top of the cleared area so you can give the seeds a good start (we had to do this because our ground is so packed with clay and rocks). Now get the kids to plant the seeds alternating sunflower seeds with morning glory’s. Once our team of kids were done with our seed pattern we also gave them Nasturtium seeds to place where ever they liked. These flowers mound at the base of the house and are edible.
Keep the seeds moist. The Morning Glory vines will grow up the sunflowers. Once the sunflowers have reached a 6 ft. height tie strings between them to create a ‘roof’ support for the vines to climb on. This little playhouse will give your children many days of imaginative fun for around $15 and it provides for a very fun project.
If you want you can add a bale of straw to the inside of the house to make a table or seat. Now that we’ve built this one, maybe next year we will go for a 2-room sunflower house.
