Vermeer's girl with the Pearl earring

[saddad]

OH, (sadly no longer a girl) can't wear earrings at work (NHS) put some pearl earrings in yesterday but lost one on the lotties. My friend lost his wedding ring within months of getting married ( I was best man) in @95. The ring turned up, literally, when he was digging his plot a decade later. Have any of you lost valuables that later turned up? I lost a set of keys about 5 years ago which turned up in a friends plot.. I had let him have a sack of compost domesticus when he couldn't get any during lock down. I fear the earring may be gone for good!

[saddad]

[Deb P]

Oh no! I guess you have a large area to search.....know anyone with a metal detector?

[saddad]

five plots... may take some time. Always told the jeweller they should make them in threes!

[galina]

Lost wedding ring here too.  Drove everybody crazy looking for it.  Through the sports centre for fingertip search after the house and the garden, the car - nothing!  Until I did another garden job which needed gloves.  There it was back again on my finger weeks later.  I had taken the gloves off and the ring must have come off inside - phew.   

[BarriedaleNick]

I lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses down the plot.  I have no idea what happened but about 6 months later after I had dug my spuds up I just found them on a path between the beds.  Pretty good nick as well.

[Tiny Clanger]

Have you got any chums or contacts with a metal detector?  If tge earing has a metal clip it may yet be found   

[small]

My mum lost her wedding ring, she thought at the hospital, I spent hours searching the corridors and car park to no avail. It turned up in one of her wellies after all.....

[pumkinlover]

I have met someone who does a metal detecting service, he gets trips to exotic places to find lost items.
There has to be someone more local though (he's in southern France!)

Nice stories about lost items.

[ACE]

Lost my marbles once, never got them back.

[saddad]

Marbles are notoriously difficult to find again ACE !

I'm not sure where to start... even looking for it.. five plots, the house or her Mother's Garden all got the treatment before we realised it had gone.
If I had a friend with a metal detector it would be the end of a beautiful friendship.. our bottom plots are host to a communal bonfire every year.. rotating through the beds. The most recent site turned up two "Fatball Tubs" full of nails, hinges, sparklers and so on.. even the other beds always turn up some metal when turned.

Just keeping my fingers crossed for a lucky find.

[saddad]

Current best hope is that it came out while filling the tomato or aubergine tubs.. we empty them out at the end of the season to reuse it for carrots and other roots..

[galina]

Current best hope is that it came out while filling the tomato or aubergine tubs.. we empty them out at the end of the season to reuse it for carrots and other roots..

Best of luck! 

Did you say 'sparklers'?  Were they detected before or during the bonfire?   

[gray1720]

I can sympathise with the tubs full of metal - at some point, someone must have burnt a houseload of furniture on one of my plots, I'm forever turning up castors, hinges and so on. Mind you, I burnt the remains of my old pallet compost bin - how many nails?! The weirdest thing I've found was a .303 bullet case that turned out to have been manufactured in the 1960s with a wooden head for machine gun practice - I can only assume the local OTC were involved! I did also find a .303 bullet (fired), but as we're by a WW1 aerodrome that's less surprising.

The other plot is only a plots-length away, nothing of the sort, yet I turn up prehistoric flints there, but never on the other plot. Make sense of that.

Good luck finding that earring!

[Obelixx]

Our house in Belgium was an ex farmhouse surrounded by former cow pasture and no garden.   We needed a man with a bulldozer to smooth all that out, scoop out a large pond for wildlife and drainage (bit boggy otherwise) and then come back and riddle it for marking out beds and sowing proper grass.

He uncovered a landmine when moving what he thought at first was just another lump of stone.   Had to get specialist gendarmes to come and take that away safely.   We didn't do any deep digging after that!

I gave up wearing earrings in the garden after losing a couple when out mowing the grass and being swiped by low branches on new trees.  More a case of remembering to take them out than put them on back then.  Nowadays of course I only go out once a week to shop and then forget to put them in.

[saddad]

Thankfully we don't have the same problem with un-exploded Ordnance that the former Western Front has!

[Tee Gee]

The weirdest thing I've found was a .303 bullet case that turned out to have been manufactured in the 1960s with a wooden head for machine gun practice -

The other plot is only a plots-length away, nothing of the sort, yet I turn up prehistoric flints there, but never on the other plot. Make sense of that.

Perhaps prehistoric man was dabbling in bullets to replace weapons made with flints?

[gray1720]

Quite a lot of the old Western Front is prime sugar beet growing country. Think about that for a minute - you are using machinery to harvest something that comes out of the soil in big hard lumps... what else is it going to pick up with them?

Do excuse me, I'm just going to put on my pantalon marron!

Tee Gee - hadn't thought of that, Oxford could re-write the history of archaeology on its own doorstep!

[Deb P]

Thankfully we don't have the same problem with un-exploded Ordnance that the former Western Front has!

I have dug up a few ? lead type bullets on my plot over the years David! Nothing that exploded though!

[pumkinlover]

Living in Sheffield in the 60' and 70's frequent findings of unexploded bombs would close areas of the city. Usually the eastern side where the steel industry once was.

[saddad]

The allotment site was allegedly used by the Normanton Barracks before the fields were bought and turned into allotments. Deb.