Allotments 4 All

my husband  ;D

A large road sign can't recall which one but 2ft by 3ft  :o

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.

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.

A slice of cheese on toast, slightly chewed, which the dog polished off in no time.

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!

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.

Quote from: Robert_Brenchley on October 24, 2009, 16:23:59
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  :)

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

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!

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!

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.

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 :-\

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.

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.

couch grass  :-X

Quote from: Little Bee on October 27, 2009, 13:17:35


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

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...

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

We've quite a few fossils on our site.   :-X      ;D ;D ;D