Whats the strangest thing youve ever dug up ?

Slinky are you sure they're marbles and not the stoppers from bottles, I used to dig those up when I was a kid, my dad told me they weren't marbles (they had a slight indented line around them) but they were a glass bottle stop.

 

A dead cat in a plastic binliner. Thing hadn't rotted away and just turned into a sort of melted moggy mush. Nasty.

 

Thanks for that treesurfer glad you didn't post pics:euw:

 

A horses testicles, the vet had buried them in the midden....

 

Being on the corner plot I think the builders used our garden as a dumping ground. chunks of lead and a huge lump of concrete were the worst. Nothing exciting like the rest of you guys. In my parents garden we used to regularly find old bottles and china shards. The most useful things were shallow metal bowls the miners used for panning tin. Ideal for scooping grain for the chickens out of sacks and scattering in their run.

 

I did find the remains of a mattress buried at the bottom of one garden in Essex and also quite bit of a car body.
In this garden some old fertiliser sacks (1970's), wire reinforcing mesh and quite a lot of wire.

 

The previous owners of our UK house probably lived on fish paste. Hundreds of little jars buried at the end of the garden . In France it’ s mostly agricultural tool bits and Roman or Napoléonic >> coins and lots of thimbles. Thimble-makers must have done a roaring trade in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

 

Where I live it was orchards for many years back in the 1800s,and early 1900s I've never found anything of interest, below the topsoil is just clay that has probably laid untouched for centuries.

 

Kind of a bit embarrassed to admit it but the strangest thing I dug up was a live frog. I grew a lot of Jerusalem artichoke and was selling a few to some restaurant kitchens and when I went to dig some up with a garden fork I found I put the fork through the leg of a frog that must have been hibernating under the dead plant material on the surface near the tubers I was aiming to harvest. I tried to carefully take the fork out of the frogs leg and left it under a hedge hoping it would be OK.

Also worked for a while on some archeology digs so not gardening related but one of my favourite finds from a Dublin city centre site where there was loads of stuff to dig up was a piece of broken plate that had a picture of a bear with a monkey on its head.

Happy gardening!

 

In my gardening for a living days, I did an old dears garden whose husband had alzheimers.
I regularly unearthed cutlery, crockery, jewelry and a host of kitchen appliances. Poor old sod didn't know he was doing it

 

Ah? A fellow 'social worker'? My first week, I ended up repairing a leaking loo for one of my old dears

 

When i was digging out a border along the driveway, i dug up a pile of roof tiles. Further over there was a lot of building sand, it filled all of the space that i wanted to make into a flower bed. Because we're on the corner when these houses were being built they dumped all of the stuff that they didn't want in our plot, covered it up with soil and put turf on top.

 

For here strange ... about a dozen old blue engineering bricks which we used to border the dining patio on the side with the arch, Brugmansia and Hibiscus.

 

My house is Victorian, part of an estate built on old market gardens. I keep an ice cream tub full of the little bits and pieces that turn up in the soil in the shed, lots of Victorian or later pottery, some clay tobacco pipe stems which might be from the market garden period, a little lead toy milkmaid who is probably early C20. My favourite one is a WW2 army uniform brass button - but it's an Australian one. Maybe some Aussie soldier far from home found himself a Cockney girlfriend who offered to sew a missing button back on? And then lost it!