Grow Your Own Magazine

As Lesley Jay finds pottery and I find glass in our soil , I wondered if anyone has found anything interesting whilst digging (or knows of someone who has!)? The guy in the plot next to ours found a couple of clay pipes on his! Smoking - not drainage!!! Some of you must live on battle sites etc.

I do battle on my plot every year, mainly Slugs & Weeds

At my folks old house we unearthed a nice collection of old pop bottles, you know the sort with marbles in.

Don't remember what happened to them

My Father-in-law unearthed a roman coin in his garden in Glasgow. How it got there I have no idea but when my Mother-in-law died a few years ago we took it to the museum to find out more about it. What a shock we had! It turns out that there are thousands of these coins turning up in Britain all the time and as a result worth very little at all.
Some times it is nice though to own something as old as the coin and not feel as thought it has to be treated with kid gloves or locked away. To hold it in your hand and try to picture the person who last held it before losing it. Was it a Roman soldier or a Celt dressed in little more than woad and a battle cry?
Jax

As some of you may be aware, I spend a lot of my working life down various holes, ditches, trenches etc and have come across may wonderful and not so wonderful things - there are the usual - old bottles, both glass and clay, clay pipes (smoking) bits of metal, old horseshoes for Clydesdales (would be Shires if I was in England) and some not so usual - old dagger (believed to be Jacobean) and a dead horse (don't ask).
Whilst digging out a rockery which was in the way of where I wanted my greenhouse, I uncovered the skeletons of three cats - think they has been feeding the bindweed!
Rat

Jax
The Roman Empire stretched as far as Perthshire and they built a poor man's Hadrians Wall (wood and turf) between Glasgow and Edinburgh - The Antonine Wall - so that may explain why it was found in a Glasgow garden
Rat

I have a spooky but interesting tale ........ We live in an Old Manse and whilst digging out an extremely old compost heap in 2002 (which had old coffee jars and heaven knows what else in it) I came across a part of a headstone (left hand side). Could just make out the name of Duncan, lost at sea 31 March in Iceland. Frightened the life out of me, especially as OH was away at the time. Slept that night with all the lights on!

Then in 2004, digging in another part of the garden I found the right side, which gave me the surname, name of the boat and the year. It was a perfect match. The local history group have done some work on it and the boat did sink, but the gentleman wasn't named as crew - all we can surmise is that he must have turned up.

I don't dig quite as deep as I used to ..... but I have a new patch of garden to dig over soon - might get some chaps in to do it while I'm at work .... think I would prefer to live on an old battle site

My mums family were from Wallsend. Everyone in Wallsend used to dig up scraps of Roman pot, didn't think anything of it. My grandfather was lucky enough to find a small roman pot, intact except for the chip he took out with the spade, so he took it home, cleaned it and put it on the mantlepiece.

My mum, some time when she was a tiny sprog in the late '30s, managed to knock it off and break it.

So they threw it away

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Digging the garden of a house some years ago I unearthed an engine, 3 wheels, bumper, rear seat, 2 shocks with springs and an exhaust....all from (I think) a MK 1 Escort.
What was a 1/2 day job lasted days and the crater looked like a meteor crash!

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Geordie

Te audire non possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure

On the subject of Romans, we have the site of a roman pottery about 500yds up the road from me but I've never found a thing! As the house was built in 1898 you expect to get something but no not even a sewer pipe let alone a smoking one

Please don't mention Roman's!

We have been clearing an old area of ground with the intention of a garden and small plot but have found a rather large area of something stone!

The ground has never had a garden or a house on it before, however there is a roman wall less than a mile from here and lots of remains of forts.....

The way the land lies it looks like I have something that I don't need and possibly no garden to look forward to!!

We have been digging in vitual darkness for an hour each night so we will see what daylight brings on Saturday??

Mandy
The Roman Wall you speak of was the Antonine Wall and was primarily wood and turf construction, though possibly the forts were more permanent structures. Me, I'd keep shtoom and tell nobody - unless I found something I thought might be valuable !
Rat

And then I wouldn't even tell him!!! good luck Ps ...can I come and visit if you need any further help?????

Still digging finding lots of stone deep down, maybe I should just stop and think about planting over it quick!

Mandy
I think if I were you, I would now seriously be considering raised beds !!
Rat

Are you sure you've not hit bedrock???

Mandy
As Nicos says, you may have hit bedrock - as I recall your plot is overlooking a railway or a canal - you are possibly on top of a cutting where they have blasted out the rock to get through. How deep have you gone down ?
Rat

Hi,

I have dug down bettween 1 1/2 and 2 foot and think I will stop there. It could be bedrock as you say as the land is at the top of a canal. There are trees growing well and brambles growing VERY well until last week! the soil seems good, plan to but top soil down next week and raised beds for the veg.

How deep will the soil need to be to plant potato etc?

Thanks again,

Mandy

A sunken garden with it's own micro-climate,protected from prevailing winds,peach and apricot espaliers on the south facing wall. Warm summer evenings surrounded by raised beds of strawberries, a bottle of chablis...sounds perfect to me!! Problem is...is your back up to all that digging??? Oh I think all this cold weather is getting to me

Hi Nicos,

Back has gone, the area has been completly dug twice! Warm weather, wine................ Bring it on!

If you've dug down 2' it will be ok to stop Mandy You only need a spade depth for spuds and then earthe them up when they're thru.

You didn't meet anyone with an Aussi accent did you

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ntg

Never be afraid to try something new.
Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark.
A large group of professionals built the Titanic

http://grief-encounters.blogspot.com/

Sorry picked this thread up late...

I have an anderson shelter in my back garden

Mind you I'm an bit paranoid about it as I was saying to my Dad that it'd be really fab to try and clean out the earth and try and make a feature out of it but he expected it to be quite unstable now... Thing is I'm really paranoid walking/cultivating the soil there as it's quite close to the surface...

Needless to say I have now planted some oriental grasses and bulbs in that area so I don't have to maintain it much!

Maybe the OH will pop into the garden one day to see where I've gone and find me struggling upside down in the collapsed shelter!

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Shortie

"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children; one of these is roots, the other wings" - Hodding Carter

shortie - how about converting it into a rhubarb distillery???

Mmmmmm... you mean like a bootleg rhubarb Schnapps factory?...

Ooo... now there's an idea...

Could you imagine the damamge already done if the rhubard had been planted there? Don't think there would be much of the shelter left by now!

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Shortie

"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children; one of these is roots, the other wings" - Hodding Carter

We have a large air raid shelter (mostly above ground) in the garden. Our house was taken over as a hospital in the war (the house is not THAT big only the officers and staff stayed in the house, ordinary folk stayed in th