Have you ever found anything just really off the wall while digging in the garden. Something "planted" there by a previous property owner or dropped by a visiting rodent? We bought our house in March of 1987 . The previous owner had bought the house when it was brand new, she got to pick colors, carpet, cabinets, etc. Either she didn't have many choices or her decorating style left a lot to be desired and she never thought it was necessary to redecorate either We had been here about 4 years when I made my first attempt at gardening in the backyard. While digging up the weeds in an effort to create a flower bed along the back wall of the house I found a mans ring. It is a black star sapphire in a 14k gold setting. We have never had it appraised but my husband likes to wear it when we go out. Over the years we have found keys and roofing nails but the ring was by far the best find. Toni
I've never found anything as valuable as the ring you found Toni but I have dug up some strange sculptured stones. (5 in all) I will try to remember to post a photograph of them to let you see. We've also had various plants arrive in the garden that we certainly didn't put there. The latest was a little holly tree that sprung up in the front garden. The only other things we've found (apart from brick paths, nails etc) are a few whole and broken clay pipes and some broken china. I'm still looking for that stash of buried treasure though!!!!
Lot of modern coins, but best was an 1804 penny, deliberately placed, we think, in the foundations of one of the houses which were here in what is now our garden. Mind we have also found a metre by half metre by half metre carved stone trough, probably worth now over £1,000. The oddest was an old style pushchair, sans enfant, but upright and buried in rubbish.
Nope, nothing in the garden, but then the houses here are relatively new - built around the late 60's. On the allotment I have dug up a huge rusty old key, I like to imagine it is a key to the old priory that used to be on the land, and a kids tea party plate with a Noddy design on it! Like you Eileen, I live in hope of digging up some treasure, maybe some Roman gold as the Romans loved Essex! Eric, your trough is wonderful, a real piece of fabulous stone!
In the garden I unearthed a butlers, sink, nowhere near as beautiful as Eric's! And on the allotment a safe, EMPTY unfortunately! :cry: :cry:
Our house was built in 65, long enough ago that I do find some goodies as I dig - mostly an endless supply of old style plastic cigarette filters...seems the fellow who gardened like to puff as he puttered. Digging to plant a sword fern, I found what may have once been a decorative little home project, perhaps a small alcove such as you might put a planter or little statue in. Now it was just lots of little square tiles and bits of decorative rock buried in the dirt at the base of a large tree. Nails, parts of toys, a dog chew, pennies, broken crockery... where there used to be a little picnic gazebo in the past there are a few lilies that come up all by themselves... I think the most interesting ones have been the hatchet-head buried inside a large rhododendron near the healed over chop marks on the trunk - seems someone started to chop it down and lost the battle along the way, for which I am grateful. Also when I began digging in the front and found brick, I dug some more and found aggregate stepping stones which led to a larger excavation of the strawberry-engulfed mound of dirt - the end result was a stone-lined alcove with a water faucet in it! The faucet worked too - rusty at first, but it worked. I now use it to water the front, much more convenient than the faucet back by the house. No rings...yet...
Our property was once an old homestead and the property was first recorded at the courthouse in 1836. We have found some old coins in the yard too. The wierdest thing was not something we found but what we bought. We had gone to a nursery that was going out of business. They had bargains on a lot of stuff. I bought a 5 gallon pot of cone flower for like a dollar and thought I had really gotten a good deal. I planted it and it grew, but about the time when the other cone flowers were blooming, this one wasn't. I thought well maybe it won't bloom this first year. The plant got bigger and bigger. I fertilized it every other week. By August it was 10 ft. tall. I called it my Mutant Ninja Cone Flower. Finally in Sept. that year it bloomed. And it was a very huge Evening Primrose. Which around here are so common in the fields they are considered weeds!
