Test tubes, petals, bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. A garden potion lab with a recipe book, a fizzing finale, and absolutely no rules about mixing.
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The mud kitchen was getting ignored until I put out six test tubes in a rack. Same mud, same garden, but suddenly it was a laboratory.
They wrote recipes. Actual recipes, with quantities: three petals, two spoons of mud, one drop of the green water. Then they made me drink one, and I mimed it very convincingly.
We finish every session with the fizz - a spoon of bicarb in the bottom of a tube and vinegar poured on top. It is the same trick every time and it has never once got old.
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Set the tray up outside with the test tube rack in the middle and everything else around it - this is the invitation.
Let them free-mix first, with no instructions at all. The first fifteen minutes should be pure pouring.
Introduce the labels: every potion that gets made needs a name and a sticky label on the tube.
Bring out the notebook and write down one recipe together, with real quantities, so it can be made again.
Make the colour waters: turmeric for yellow, beetroot for pink, red cabbage water for purple - and watch what cabbage water does when vinegar goes in.
Add petals and grass for texture, and use the sieve to strain a potion into a clean jar.
Save the fizz for last: a spoonful of bicarb in a tube, then vinegar poured slowly on top over the tray.
Line up the finished potions along the step and photograph them. Tip them out, rinse, and the lab is ready for tomorrow.
Once the potions have been stirred and tasted by imaginary dragons, the same mud becomes a building material.
Mud bricks, towers and little villages in the garden.
Red cabbage water is the best value trick here: it goes pink with vinegar and green with bicarb, so the colour change is real chemistry rather than food colouring. Keep vinegar and bicarb in their own pots and hand them out last, or the whole session becomes fizzing within four minutes.
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