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In my last garden I found an entire greenhouse and shed, complete with some contents, which had both been demolished and buried under the flower bed. It took two trips to the tip, with my Astra completely full both times, to get rid of it all.

Zoe

We have found around 50 complete beer bottles(communicating size is going to be tricky here- they are called "tallies" which hold 750ml ish)and numerous broken bits- why they buried masses of whole bottles I don't know. Various old cleaning fluid bottles, two pairs of shoes, random bits of corrogated iron, taps, battery leads, masses of bricks..once a sherry flagon stuffed with a plastic flower arrangement (?) The soil in our garden is good but the trick is finding it between the hundred years of rubbish people have seen fit to bury!

Jessiebean wrote:We have found around 50 complete beer bottles

I can trump that one. When I moved into one house a few years ago, I found over 500 brand new olive oil bottles and a whole lot of jam jars. The previous owner had a business selling speciality oils and dressings which had gone bust and they'd just left all the stock in the garden

Zoe

Wow. Were they usable? I would be stoked, well maybe a little overwhelmed by 500 of the things but everything I have found is totally useless which is a shame as I love a bit of repurposing!

Did I mention the anchor? Don't know if it's for tethering the house during the higher winds

Jessiebean wrote:Wow. Were they usable? I would be stoked, well maybe a little overwhelmed by 500 of the things but everything I have found is totally useless which is a shame as I love a bit of repurposing!

Most of the bottles were useable apart from being full of green slime where the rain had got into them. Washed out and sterilised they were fine. For years, all my friends got bubble bath in prettily decorated bottles, or sloe gin. Then I gave some to a friend who had an olive grove in Italy. I've still got a few in the shed somewhere and the rest went to a reclamation yard. The worst part was wheelbarrowing them all down from the garden to the shed in the first place.

But I'd much rather have an anchor, that'd be well cool. I did find a riding crop in an airing cupboard once! Oh. and the previous owners of this house left me a large galvanised water dispenser for chickens. That was well useful. I think it helps if you move into an old house, there's usually more useful stuff buried in the garden.

Zoe

The first house I bought in France had a 32 ft trailer parked in the woods and I was told that it would be moved before we took possession, however three months after we had moved in it was still there and we were told by the police the previous owner was serving time, for car theft and that they would have it removed. They found in the trailer all spare parts from many makes of cars, and I found the chassis's and bodies of many makes of car, buried in my garden.

I must learn not to read too fast as the words trailer, bodies and buried leaped out at me before I read the whole thing properly.

The only thing I find in my garden apart from bloody stones and rocks are a load of old rusty nails and hinges in my veg patch from the previous owner's habit of burning old doors in his fireplace then no doubt chucking the ash over the veg patch.

There's the legend of the present secretary of our allotment society found a complete Ford Prefect buried on his allotment when he took it over in the dim and distant past. apparently it didn't work though

Friends of ours asked us to come over and bring our metal detector. Apparently, years ago, the last owners of their house buried a crushed six berth caravan somewhere in the garden (garden's an acre or so big) and they wanted to find it. This we did but they decided it was too big a job to dig it out so it's still there under the lawn!

You are all so lucky, all i seem to have found in our new garden is fantastic soil (led to believe it was part of an allotment years ago) and 2 lazy teenagers.
!!

Millymollymandy wrote:I must learn not to read too fast as the words trailer, bodies and buried leaped out at me before I read the whole thing properly.

Yeah, me too. I hope you managed to persuade the police to dig it all over properly, double dig and turn it over nicely.

Millymollymandy wrote:The only thing I find in my garden apart from bloody stones and rocks are a load of old rusty nails and hinges in my veg patch from the previous owner's habit of burning old doors in his fireplace then no doubt chucking the ash over the veg patch.

Ooops guilty of that one. Not so much old doors but random bits of skipwood with all sorts of rubbish stuck in it.

Only been in this house for a week, just started on the garden at the weekend. Found a few bricks, some huge old bones that a dog must have buried years ago and loads of woodlice. Yuk yuk yuk I hate the things.  as ive been clearing the jungley bits ive unearthed hoardes of them.

Oh heavens, that reminds me - when we moved in here we found a spinal column, almost intact, under a hedge. It scared the life out of me to the point of nearly calling the police until we decided it was too big for a human. Still don't know what it was but it's slowly disappearing vertebra by vertebra, since we've been here.

Must remember to go and have a look to see if there's any of it left.

A woolly mammoth?