For granddaughter, considering :
Rubber chunks (recycled truck tires) very expensive and some issues with toxicity.
New product called sofplay - it is some sort of astroturf like with mat under it
Wood chips - mulch
Any thoughts, anyone familiar with sofplay
what about good ol' sand? it worked for me as a kid. lol
Sand draws cats, and is very hard on bare knees in summer. It also won't stay where you put it. IMHO, grass is best, and either live with the divots right under the swings, or stake the thing down with augers so you can move it every few weeks, intead of putting the legs in holes.
aem sends...
If there are instances with toxicity the School, daycare and large zoo I've seen using the rubber product on playgrounds haven't heard about it.
I like the biodegradeability of mulch. I have to keep it raked every couple of weeks to give it a little loft and occassionally I wet it to prevent splinters. In the 23 years that I've been doing thisfor my kids and grandkids we've had no splinters, no cat crap, nothing that makes me want to change.
Sand, gravel, concrete, asphalt. What did you have under yours? Mine was grass with a huge divot in it.
Stake it down?? Hmmmm. Mine didn't have that either... LOL!
Grass with the divot, as did all the public parks in the old hometown back then. (They were just starting to switch to the safety seats when I was run out of town.)
aem sends...
Broken glass. It will help kids develop balance and agility. Will helptoughen them upwhen they fall
n Apr 10, 5:42 pm, allan wrote:
We just have turf under our swingset. It works fine. :)
Donna
According to allan :
Look up some chart recommendations for many materials w.r.t. "safe fall distance".
Figure what the maximum fall height is, the charts will make suggestions as to what they think appropriate for that height, and work from there.
Strange as it may sound, a 4-6" bed of pea gravel is just about as good as vastly more expensive solutions like rubber. 8-10' fall distance, doesn't grow anything, and doesn't attract cats.
Sand, depending on the type and how compacted it gets, is almost as good, but it tracks, can grow things, and attracts cats.
The natural sand unders ours is always quite loose, so we didn't have to bother. Didn't track, because it had grass on it ;-)
Can you tell me which turf you used? I, too, am looking at putting turf under my swingset.
No idea. It sort of came with the house. :)
I think you are over-planning this. Unless you are setting up your play area over a cement pad, or the children's parents are highly litigious, you really don't need anything under the swingset other than dirt and grass. Really. :)
Best wishes,
Donna
Chuckle. Amen, Sister! When I was a wee one, if the ruts under the swingset got too hard, or too muddy, we'd just yank the thing out of the ground and move it over a few feet. Posthole digger made short work of creating new pockets to drop the legs into, if the ground was too hard to simply push the tubes or pipes in. Even at the public park, on the big-ass swingsets, it was (and AFAIK, still is) plain old dirt and grass underneath. In grade school, the jungle gym had ASPHALT under it.
I never saw any of those 'safety' ground covers until the late 70s, after a few schools or cities got sued because the little darlings got scuffed up. Hell, I was in high school in the early 70s, before the parks and schools all switched to the sling-style 'safety seats' on the swings, that held your butt more tightly.
Yes, you should teach kids to 'play nice', and crowded playgrounds should have parents or school staff monitoring to give a time-out to kids that get hyper-aggressive or start feeling immortal. But kids on playgrounds ARE gonna get scuffed up once in a while. It is part of being a kid, and 99.99% of the time, is no big deal. A couple of scraped knees is a real good way to learn that jumping off the swing at the high point isn't a good idea. Unless the kid has unusual medical conditions like brittle bones or something, common-sense precautions (no pieces of pipe sticking out of ground, or sharp corners on equipment, etc.) are all that is called for, IMHO.
aem sends...
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