Allotments 4 All
Allotment Stuff => The Basics => Topic started by: simmo116 on October 20, 2009, 18:04:45
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the weekend i was digging over my corn patch when i spotted something coinlike in the dirt after a night in the brown sauce it turned out to be a george the v silver sixpence circa 1910. ;D ;D ;D
i never new our allotments were that old. so come on what have you lot dug up/uncoverd over the years?
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A dead cat.
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Not strictly allotment, but I opened a bale of hay for the goats and found an entire dead fox in the middle.......imagine a smiley for feeling sick.....
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I have told this one before on here but here goes.We had dug most of our plots except a bit at the top. When Tony started to dig he found. A pair of mens slippers and a pair of socks, a pair of trousers and a jumper. I told him to stop right there before he found the owner of the clothes. There is now a comfrey bed on it .
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ok no more dead things aloud!!!! i've just had me tea....lol
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Phew, don't know about wierdest -- but for quantity, here goes ;- bed springs, padlocks, door bolt,
nails and screws, a stirrup, scaffolding, teaspoons and a mega - moulding collection of photographic
slides layered under some ancient carpet -- stuck together through time, didn't want to investigate
further !
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A reel of 8mm film, I think someone wanted to bury the evidence ;)
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A ceramic shower tray, that I could barely move. It was eventually taken by a friend with an allotment (and compulsive hoarding tendencies) who said it would be good for keeping seedlings watered, so maybe thats why it was there.
I've also dug up several bits of curtain rail, which I can't imagine a use for on an allotment!
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..oh, and a yellow plastic duck!
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Nails, old chair spring, metal dowel, glass and some more nails nothing of any excitement :(
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i found a 'kayes' oil can in some manure i had delivered. it looks like this http://www.oldtools.co.uk/tools/misc/oil.cans/oil.cans.pg1.php, but a bit dirtier!!
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I had leaches on my first plot, very much alive.
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When I was working on my old plot it was very overgrown to start with.
I cut back the hedges and found an old kettle that had been lodged in the hedge.Obviously someone long ago had put it there for the Robins.
I dug up loads of small ceramic peaces.Lots of lovely patterns.
On my latest allotment it was not just the plot that was overgrown it was almost the whole site.When I walked round I found about three of the old fashioned metal watering cans,I use them for decoration as they are a bit heavy for me to use.I have seen them for sale in second hand places but I would not part with them.To me they are a part of the allotment s history.
Found all kinds of tat as well
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a ?lead toy cow i f ound in my garden
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A couple of old medicine bottles, nothing much exciting, I keep promising myself I will get my metal detector out of the loft and take it over the lottie. ;D ;D ;D
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Just some broken glass which turned out to be a bit of a pane.
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Cornykev, looking for a pumpkin. ;D ;D
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An underground air-raid shelter at the bottom of the garden and a Victorian (?) child's china ball.
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Dug up a old tin bath
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I dug up a full chest of gold coins once
:o
Then i woke up :-X
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Just some broken glass which turned out to be a bit of a pane.
;D
I've dug up lots of little bits of different coloured glass and I've put them in an upturned plastic bottle over the years. When I get enough think I might have a go at making signs of my plot numbers.
Ninny
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Over 200 hen eggs buried in a huge mound on one plot we had ! someone on site fed the foxes trays of eggs and they hid them on our plot ! had to be very careful digging then up cos they stunk !
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A cannon ball :o
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A cannon ball :o
you near a castle :)
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A hill fort, apparently. Perhaps we were in the practice target area!
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The first plot had a "compost heap" which turned out to be a third of a wartime Morrison Shelter. The other plot had the remaining two-thirds, half-buried in the ground.
But apart from that, the usual load of broken glass & convolvulous.
(I have a theory: she said to to him, "I've got no use for it here - take it down the allotment.")
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No, more like.........
She said "get rid of that" and he thought "hmm, that might come in handy, I'll take it down the allotment"
;D
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A few stone age flint tools.
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A surprising number of six inch nails!
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A yellow shower tray!!
Duke
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If I found anything stranger than me on the plot I think you'd all be very scared....
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The grandchidren collect the little bits of china and pottery. One day we are going to make something out of them
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2 ironing boards, dug up a rotted bag of broken bathroom tiles, and two taps compolete with piping........also dug up an old silver spoon with an army crest on, apparently cavalry used to exercise their horses on the land where our allotments are, so I have visions of it being an officers cup of char spoon!
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There was a complete bathroom suite (in bits) where the greenhouse is now on Plot 52... ???
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Not an allotment find. Our house is an ex farmhouse surrounded by what was very lumpy bumpy cow pasture so we'd had a chap with a bulldozer come and make a flat area behind the house for a terrace and a path leading up to the new vegetable plot which is 3' higher, dig out a pond for drainage and smooth out the remaining area ready for grass and borders.
The following spring he came witha big machine to riddle the soil prior to grass sowing and unearthed a land mine.
We don't do deep digging.
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when I came to the top of the allotment waiting list I was offered the choice of two, one had an old cess pit 'somewhere' on it, needless to say I took the other plot, wouldn't fancy 'finding' that by accident! :o
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clay pipes,lots of em
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Bucket loads of broken dinner services, and a safe...........empty sadly :-(
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Wild boar! destructive little blighters!!
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A fossilized sponge...so it was obviously under the sea once.
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my husband ;D
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A large road sign can't recall which one but 2ft by 3ft :o
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Bits of shrapnel. There was an AA gun that went up and down the railway nearby during the Blitz. The people who had the plot at the time slept in the shed to avoid the raids, and had shrapnel bouncing off the roof. The bits I found have too large a radius though, they look as though they came from a blast bomb.
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My plot and my old plot are a veritable junk mine. I have a box full of some of the more interesting stuff I've fished out.
Two Saxon bone pins, which I had identified by the museum.
A porcelain dolls head.
4 huge iron keys.
A small jar full of marbles.
A silver serving spoon, all bent up but silver none the less.
A wrought iron bin, which broke my fork.
5 meters of metal cable, which broke another fork.
A ploughshare.
About 5 cubic metres of ragstone, which includes some fossils too.
My old plot had been a cottage garden, the cottage had been destroyed by a doodlebug, it had a well and loads of household rubbish in the garden. No idea why my new plot is full of stuff, but it is, the bone pins were the most interesting, they are identical too, but found some way apart so I wonder what else is to be found.
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A slice of cheese on toast, slightly chewed, which the dog polished off in no time.
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I found bits of burnt and melted brick and tile (slag stuck to them) - a WW2 bomb hit houses nearby, and I think they must have dumped the rubble.
And lots of lovely pot sherds, but nothing unusual there!
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One thing I take for granted, but has to be unusual, is Victorian crucibles. Mostly they're in bits, but I have several complete ones, and there are still one or two places where the stream bank is built out of them. They vary in size, but the average must be about 18 inches high; occasionally I come across lids. They have to be from the local factories.
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One thing I take for granted, but has to be unusual, is Victorian crucibles. Mostly they're in bits, but I have several complete ones, and there are still one or two places where the stream bank is built out of them. They vary in size, but the average must be about 18 inches high; occasionally I come across lids. They have to be from the local factories.
Must make for a handy source of drainage sherds for bigger pots :)
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Hi all,
Like Elvis, I find lots and lots of victorian pipe stems, some bowls but not many.
I also have a few bits of worked flint which are found all along the river valley here. The site was part of the estate for a large house with a dairy and I can imagine the victorian gardeners working the same land I work and before them going back a few thousand years the same land feeding hunters with flint tools.
I like the idea of the continuity of the land feeding people and being part of that chain. I make sure I don`t leave plastic rubbish for future generations to find.
Col
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I dug up a bottle of bright pink nail varnish last year. I remember the old boy I took it over from saying he'd left some bits and pieces that he must remember to come and collect!
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Digging in the garden, my spade hit what I thought was a flint. Dug it out and threw it to one side, then realised it had strange pineapple markings on it. Took all the soil off it to discover a well-preserved WW II hand grenade, still with it's fuse and pin in and dated 1944. Being familiar with them, I thought I'd better let the police know that I had an apparently live Mills No. 36 bomb. The response I got was 'How do you know?' - No good answer to that!
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about 10% of a ford escort- doors,seats and a few wheels.
Like Elvis, another plot holder found an entire rack of clay pipes in virtually perfect condition.
Someone else who is interested in such things has found numerous clay bottles.
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I live on the Norfolk /Suffolk border next to the sea.The land here is very flat but where my allotment is there is a large dip which is now an overgrown woodland.
My allotment and two others are at the top of this dip and there is 5 more allotments lower down in the dip.
I am sure this was caused by a bomb drop in the war because East Anglia is the nearest coast from Germany ans there is still unexploded bombs found here on a regular basis.It certainly looks like a huge crater :o
Only today while i was digging over my potato bed i hit something hard......frightens the life out of me everytime but it turned out to be a large boulder about twice the size of a brick and rounded!!!! :o
Meant to also say that the allotment was a new allotment i took on about four years ago so never been dug over before.
I have dug up quite a few long thin cast iron objects but don't know what they are :-\
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What are the flints like, Columbus? Any chance of pics? Are they worked on one side or on both sides?
I've got a bowlful of bits of clay pipe, and a few bowls.
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A cow's jaw bone - used to be next to a farmyard 100 years ago.
On my present plot yards and yards of thick metal cable - it used to be a turkey farm and it was used to hold up something in the sheds. Wire cutters wont cut it. We have used a mini digger to pull a lot out but I have picked up a pair of bolt cutters at a market and they slice through it.
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couch grass :-X
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I have dug up quite a few long thin cast iron objects but don't know what they are :-\
POssibly the shrapnel load from certain sorts of bomb.... IIRC they were referred to as casement types (I might be very wrong aout that, that might be an artillery definition) but basically the bomb consisted of about 25% explosive and the rest of it would be cast iron balls and rods wrapped round the explosive core.... it does a spectacular amount of damage and is very effective at killing people a significant distance from the blast, the 250Kg variant would throw those rods the best part of half a mile at velocities that would kill.... nasty things, but no worse than what we were dropping on them....
chrisc
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I dont know if it is particularly wierd but I did dig up a huge pile of ciggarette butts. There were hundreds and hundreds of them all in one place like someone had been saving them up. I can tell you that they do not seem to decompose at all...
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One of my neighbouring plot holders unearthed what looked like a shark's tooth - and our local museum confirm it was and from the ancestors of today's 'great white shark' and around 83million years old. We unearth quite a few fossils and have quite a collection of these and other 'bits' in our field community shed which we show to the school pupils who visit our allotments; some of the 'fossils' are coprolites, which is dinasaur 'poo' and these always fascinate the children.
The collection also includes parts of old clay pipes, a 1911 penny, several hand made nails and several old spoons
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We've quite a few fossils on our site. :-X ;D ;D ;D
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I dont know if it is particularly wierd but I did dig up a huge pile of ciggarette butts. There were hundreds and hundreds of them all in one place like someone had been saving them up. I can tell you that they do not seem to decompose at all...
Maybe they were saved to soak for nicotinic acid which was used as an insecticide, maybe still is though cannot remember what it deters.
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There's a rather odd individual in a hat that lurks round my plot. Occassionally does a bit of digging etc.
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Hi all, Hi Peter :)
[quoteWhat are the flints like, Columbus? Any chance of pics? Are they worked on one side or on both sides?][/quote]
Some are scrapers with a bulb of percussion and some are tiny pointy bits.
I`m not an expert at all but on an episode of time team Phil ..? was raving about flints and I though well I`ve got some like that in my shed.
I`ve seen a map online that showed worked flints found all along the river valley that our site is part of.
Col
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rocking horse poo
;D
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Has it got shavings in it. ;D ;D ;D
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Some of the worked flints I find are quite amazing. They are not very spectaular to look at. But I find if I turn them round in my hand suddenly you find that they fit and that all sorts of shapes have been made in them to make them a comfortable fit in the palm with grips for the fingers.
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Some of the worked flints I find are quite amazing. They are not very spectaular to look at. But I find if I turn them round in my hand suddenly you find that they fit and that all sorts of shapes have been made in them to make them a comfortable fit in the palm with grips for the fingers.
Digeroo, can you post some pix? I'd like to compare them with some flints a Danish fellow gave me years ago found in Denmark. I never figured out that the slight curve was for a better ergonomic fit!
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I'll try my best but they kind of look like stones. Except we are quite a long way from any large flints naturally. It is only when you hold them that you realise they are much more cleverly worked. They are cetainly much more basic than a arrow head or a spear head.
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When I first got mine I found myself digging up miles and miles of nylon string all over the place. It's now all in a huge ball in the shed and I use it for marking out rows and things like that.
I can only imagine that the previous plotholder had either built a huge string construction to keep the pigeons off, or had some sort of bizarre cat's cradle fetish ??? ??? :) still it comes in handy.
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:) clay pipes here too / shades x
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I had all the previous plot holder's tools - or rather - the heads of them. He had burnt them all before leaving.
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I found a kind of scythe thing, it had a heavy thick curved blade which was less of a crescent than a scythe and mounted on a pole about 3 feet long. Excellent for clearing thick grass but I got a few 'he's a nutter' looks as I was swinging it about.
Also a chickens leg.
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that tool is known as a 'slasher' and commomly used in hedge-laying!!
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Well it certainly lives up to it's name!