Topic: What's the strangest thing you have ever dug up on your allotment?

[Deb P]

I've just been on a trip to our local 'Recycling Centre' as our city dump is so grandly called these days, with six large bucket loads of various types of rubbish from the lottie.

This trip, we took:

2 tubs of hardcore (broken bricks, lumps of concrete dug up around the new rhubarb patch)

Several metal objects (lumps of molten aluminium from previous fires I guess)
 
A set of bathroom taps and a tub of broken bathroom tiles (all dug up underneath old compost bin)

A car exhaust- no sign of the rest of the car (or perhaps we haven't dug deeply enough yet!)

A bag full of filthy plastic bags, black bin liners, gravel bags and bits of nylon mesh (all found buried in a pile)

A bucket of broken glass, old medicine bottles, several disposable razors (dug up from beneath old shed)

I've tried hard to reuse anything we've found if possible on the plot, but it seems a lot of it is just other peoples buried rubbish! I think the two ironing boards we discovered when we first started clearing the plot are the oddest things we have found so far, but what have other people found, anything interesting?

[okra]

Nothing so extensive but found a 1937 threepenny bit last week
 

[markfield rover]

I have found a number of GWR brass jacket buttons
bound to be a romantic story as to how they got there
some 'brief encounter'!

[Jeannine]

Just the bone, the same week that human ones were found on a lottie in Peterborogh, that really freaked me till someone looked at my picture and said it was from a cows spine not a humans. was I ever relieved XX Jeannine

[mc55]

an egg (hen), enough screws & nails to fill a hardware shop, glass, whole bricks, 6ft long concrete fence posts (?) and bones - presumably small mamals, not the previous owner and a nest of baby voles !!!  At the moment I'm digging up a carpet which is buried under 5" of compacted, weed infested earth - nice.

Next door dug up a rat at the w/e  :-X :-X presumably the fox is using his lottie as his personal larder.

[manicscousers]

a little rusty trowel that Ray put a new handle n and he cleaned it up, just right for me..
an old, really old fashioned shed key..very rusty
so many carpets I think there was someone's front room under there,
the side of a tin shed, laying on the ground
the diggy bit from the thing they dig the roads up with   :)

[Mrs Ava]

An old key, a dolls house size noddy tea plate, carpet and black plastic, newts and a next of moles!

[Vegemite]

noddy plate- wow that would be pirate treasure to my daughter!

we know a bloke who buried loads of coins then the following week asked his kid to help him dig up the garden- and told him it was pirate treasure when he found it! the kid is now grown up and very unhappy with his dad- everytime someone needed help in his garden the kid was there with his spade expecting to find treasure!!

[gingerninja38]

enough glass for a greenhouse, the metal things that hold windows open. enough nails to hold the greenhouse together, ciggie packets, carrier bags, carpets, foam and today found some of that silver insulation foil that goes behind radiators.

[saddad]

Mark Gratton on plot 120 opposite DebP found a wedding ring, his that he had lost three years earlier when digging the Lottie.... he has two now!
 ;D

[Wicker]

Usual bits of broken crockery, bones and enormous nails but the luckiest finds were two very badly corroded keys which Mr W spent weeks cleaning and which turned out to fit (a) the shed and (b) the allotment site gate so we have a set each ;)

[Mrs Ava]

I am hoping that one day one of my opal earings turns up on the plot next to mine.  As I was walking along the path a couple of weeks back, the wind blew and the netting whipped up around my earing and wripped it clean out!  I cried!!  I love opals, my fave stone ever and my love had bought me these when we were on hols on the Isle of Wight.  Someones treasure one day.

[Deb P]

I am hoping that one day one of my opal earings turns up on the plot next to mine.  As I was walking along the path a couple of weeks back, the wind blew and the netting whipped up around my earing and wripped it clean out!  I cried!!  I love opals, my fave stone ever and my love had bought me these when we were on hols on the Isle of Wight.  Someones treasure one day.

Oh no! I love opals too, cried like baby when I lost a black opal earring that OH had bought me on honeymoon... :'(

[busy_lizzie]

Aaw! Hope you find your opal ear ring soon EJ. I am always burying my small tools, and just recently dug up a rusty old pair of secataurs, that I lost last year on the plot.

We have found loads of bones, including a big jaw bone and a shoulder blade, possibly a dog, at least hoping that, and not something human. Lots of clay pipe bits and small pieces of pottery. busy_lizzie   

[MacArthur Park]

An old sixpence and a very rusty flat iron!

[tim]

A George II shilling & clay pipes, clay pipes & clay pipes!

[Trevor_D]

In plot 1, we tried to move the rusting metal compost bin and it turned out to be half of a Morrison shelter!

Then we took over plot 2 (next-door-but-one) which had enough debris on it to keep Steptoe & Son busy for months. And guess what the compost bin was? The other half of the Morrison shelter!! It was sunk so deep into the ground that I think I might turn the hole into a pond!

[glow777]

What's the strangest thing you have ever dug up on your allotment?
my foot - with a badly time swing of the spade didnt half hurt

[Robert_Brenchley]

Bits of shrapnel from the Blitz, and decaying fragments of an Anderson shelter. The shelter wasn't usable as it flooded (not surprising next to a stream), so they ended up dossing in the shed for a while.

[ACE]

The first year on my first allotment, it was vegetables. I done everything wrong and the nieghbours were amazed that I had a crop at all.

E.J. Claim on your insurance, but don't tell them you purchased them on th I.W.  ;)