Nursewhen Digs It Up

I think you got your photos in the wrong order. Surely the last one went first! :D

 

Dang! I didn't want to admit that it was actually a pint of cat urine.

 

1st circle, 2nd circle, 3rd circle.... Are we discussing Solzhenitsyn or Dante? Virgil is my hero. :D

 

It certainly feels like Dante at the moment, though I haven't yet had to lie in the mud under constant rain, hail and violent storms.

Mind you, if next summer is anything like our last one, I'll pobably end up doing just that.

 

:eek:

 

:D :D :D Sorry to laugh at your expense Nursewhen but Geoff's post made me howl!!
Helen.xxx.

 

It's not at my expense, it made me laugh too.

 

Your test hole indicates the hardcore is free draining.

Personaly I would build the soil level up by importing topsoil and organic matter. Top soil at �£25-�£30 per ton is a lot cheaper than skip hire and the soil you would then need.

If you can get 300mm of soil this will be enough for most pereneials. For anything with a larger rootball just break out an area for the roots using a bar, remove the rubbish and dig in some compost/manuare and top soil.

 

Agree. We have areas of this garden where there are house foundations and all we have done is to put 18 inches of top soil over the old concrete floors. Only trees really need to go deeper than that.

 

With regard to the third circle i wonder whether you will have cement under there. The presence of all that building sand might suggest that is where they were making all the concrete and cement. Quite often they would have just dumped spare concrete and cement and just buried it. If it is then sometimes you can lift bits up or smash it up if its quite thin. i would use a fork to see if you can work out where the edge is because you can work at it from the edge, but you need to expose what is under there.
I just hope you don't have what I had on my first garden. I moved in when the house was 25 years old and i had to hire a concrete breaker and filled a skip with what i dug up - on a bigger area than yours i should hasten to add. Builders are so dirty. On my present house which we got new the worst was those metal ties they put round piles of bricks. I would dig one up and trace it, finding it eventually embedded in concrete. Why they cannot throw everything in a skip? They just bury and forget. I cannot stand a garden with buried rubbish.

 

I totally agree Geoff, it`s obviously easier (and cheaper) for builders to hide their rubbish rather than dispose of it properly. David.

 

Thanks all, I hope there's not cement down there! One of my work colleagues was kidding that I might need a kango and at the time I just laughed!

I can relate to metal ties! When I was digging out the tree stump, there was one root which I absolutely could not get out of the ground and I couldn't work out why.

Eventually I found a metal cable embedded in it which ended up in a lump of concrete.
I dug that out but still couldn't get the root out. Then I realised that the cable came out of the other side of the root as well and that also led to a lump of concrete. It was effectively stapled into the ground!

I've sent off my letter. I'm now waiting to see how Bryant deal with it.

 

Don't come digging here then folks! There are Tudor house remains under and around the Summer house. There are the remains of 3 other houses which fell down in the 1950's (1804 built!) and were bulldozed across the land. At some time someone has had a load of subsoil delivered and dumped on the lower half of the garden to raise it so that it does not flood. The previous occupants kept pigs so there are the remains of their accomodation and the people before us mended cars and caravans and there are all sorts of bits of those around too. Oh and did I mention that the Damson Wood appears to have been used by the whole area as a rubbish dump? And of course not forgtting the 4 feet deep lot of household debris which once covered what is now what we call the Hidden Garden. I reckon we have removed over 30 tons of assorted grot and still it turns up!

 

Always amazing what you find when you start digging.

Working in the sticks its not unncommon to find bottle dumps around here, found some strange bottles before.

 

In my first garden after I cleared the rubbish I was digging up fossilised wood. I dug a deep drainage sump, the surface was basically boulder clay from the last glaciation, the builders had obviously stolen the top soil. Below that I was into boulder clay from the previous glaciation and embedded in that was wood from the forest that had been destroyed by the advance of the glaciers. A couple of miles away at the quarry they dug up a mammoth skeleton. All I have dug up here is part of a cow or horse. On the veg plot i will have to keep trenching. After all a few yards away at the end of the road someone once dug up a Roman mirror.