I pulled out the remaining broccoli today and decided to give the soil a fork or two. Something shiny came to the surface. A silver dime! 1951, from the Denver mint.

What of monetary value have you unearthed gardening?

All I get are rusty 1960s car parts. My garden is where FIL did his backyard mechanic work.

My dad found a gold wedding ring (not his own!) when he rototilled his county garden plot one year. This was back when the county used to plow all the plots each spring, so the dirt moved around a little. He remembered the gardener two plots up from him had mentioned losing his ring the previous summer, so he was able to return it to him.

Nothing of monetary value but there are lots of small pieces of broken plates that come up when I turn the soil. There are also thick brown pieces of old jugs that look handmade. I've collected them over the years and have four or five quart ziplock bags full. One rainy day I sorted them according to color. Some future rainy day if there's nothing else to do I want to try to see if I can fit any of them together. A giant jigsaw puzzle!

We used to find the occasional arrow head in the garden.
Sometimes an old rusty piece of hardware from a saddle.
I once dug up an axe head.
Parts from a carriage or some such thing.
The whole place was a literal junk graveyard.

nothing big over the years.
marbles, old axe head, rail road spike, bricks used as fill, maybe coins, but nothing old.
first garden in the copper country turned up some large animal bones
probably bovine. there is float copper laying around much of the western U.P.
i should start scanning the property with a metal detector. ya never know what might be out there.



keith

My home was built in 1951. There was an 1840-50s large Antebellum plantation home and sugar mill works not far away on the opposite side of the lake. I’m not sure where all the slaves that worked the land and sugar works lived. There were ruins out in the woods across from my house and evidence of occupation after the civil war. A 1887 dime along with a brass butt plate of an old gun were found along with some old school irons and implements. The Plantation ruins are in a park available for a looksie once a month. After the Civil War, the plantation was abandoned and I believe the land was bought as part of a hunting club up until Dow Chemical bought the land at the start of WW2. I don’t think anything significant structurally in terms of European/Anglo/Spanish activity happened here before the Antebellum period that lasted maybe twenty years here. The Karankawas or some precursor people had a large camp on the lake and they left behind a lot of ceramic shards and piles of debris like clam and oyster shells and the occasional turtle shell and projectile point.

I’ve always wanted to know just how old is this lake. If the natives had a large camp ground, then it puts the date into hundreds of years old. These lakes have a life span, though, and I don’t think it’s anything like a glacial lake carved out of the Canadian Shield type of lifetime. Drought kills these lakes ultimately if sedimentation doesn’t. If the lake dries up significantly during a drought, terrestrial vegetation invades and once that begins the fate is sealed. One similar lake nearby has gone from open water to a tree choked swamp in my lifetime due to drought. Ultimately, the Brazos River will someday create some new lakes like this one. There’s some homes along the outside curve of the Brazos River nearby that lose a little bit of their yard every major flood. One property has a large metal outbuilding that’s inches from the cut bank. One more flood ought to do it.

I have a collection of rusty iron tools that turned up in various homes on my journey, some were in the dirt. My parents' first home was a farmed area before it was developed and the area was called "Fagan's Barn". I have a scythe (no handle) that turned up there.
One day I will take pics and post the lot for you guys to figure out what these things were for.

There's a long, curved, rock "wall" with several openings in it on the south side of my old vegetable garden, south of the house and curving around (but at a distance) the catchments which at one time may have been more full of water. After recently reading about walls used for hunting in prehistoric days, I think I should ask an archeologist to take a look. I asked my Dad but in his opinion it was left by the glaciers. However the glaciers seem to leave random boulders not 'walls' (and we have some of those too.) So I'm curious...

I also have the pieces of an old bottle that we found, many years ago when I first built here and my friend and I were trying to dig a well on the upper part of the property. This bottle was under some big boulders and some feet down, which made us think it could be old. A friend in archeology said bring it in, we'll find out. But somehow I didn't get around to it, too busy with the grind of survive. I should give him a call. Honestly I think the wall is a lot more perplexing and interesting even than the old bottle.

Beginning in the 1870s when our house was built, the back door was fairly close to a steep hillside. The bottom of the 100 foot 60% grade we call the “hollow”, or “holler” in local dialect. This hillside and holler became the garbage and other unwanted items dumping ground. Not for another hundred years was there trash service in our small village. If you are looking for bottles, jars, crockery, old household appliances, stoves, bed frames, furniture, wagons or old car parts, tires and car bodies, this is a treasure trove of junk.

Over the past twenty year we have lived here at least ten dumpsters full of stuff has been hauled out. Every time it rains more junk comes to the surface. Our garden space besides being full of old car parts was another dump site from the 40s through to the 60s. Every year’s gardening becomes an adventure. But whatever, don’t go barefoot.

The most interesting find was a musket ball. Usually, I just find pieces of glass that work their way to the surface.

I've found a lot of broken glass bottles, ceramics and a crisp packet from the 1960s My neighbour tells me that their previous occupier liked to bury toilets, and one chap I sold some tomatoes to last year found a piano under the lawn.

Sure it does, just not in the way you imagine.
The truckload of tomatoes I pull from my garden are worth more than all the silver dimes in the world.
People who have experienced true hunger know this.