Well,

I haven't dug up anything of interest at this house...but back at the ranch that's another story.

My parents live out in the country and have a big mole problem.

I was walking around the place a couple of months ago and found an old glass bottle with a glass dropper still inside sitting on top of a mole hill. It looked like an old ear ache medicine bottle. Seems the rubber top part of the dropper disintegrated over the years and all that was left was the glass bottle with the glass dropper.

Also found several pieces of broken glass on top of the same mole hill. They looked like glass from a vehicle's tail lights and blinkers...some red and some yellow.

I wanted to yell down into the hole and ask that dratted mole where's the rest of the car?!

~ Cat

My mom lost the diamond off of her engagement ring. A very large diamond. She took her gloves off and it was gone. I don't know how long we looked for it.

I found an entire brick-paved driveway about 3 feet deep in the ground, almost a hundred feet long. I first found only a few bricks when I buried one of my dear departed cats, thought nothing of it at the time. Then a year or so later I was digging out a nasty pokeweed root and found some more about twenty feet away from the cat's grave. Now every time I dig anywhere within a certain alignment I can be sure of unearthing a few antique bricks. They apparently lead to an old carriage house (long gone) that was on the opposite side of my property from where the garage now sits. I also found the brick-paved floor of the carriage house. Lovely old bricks. My property must have been steeply-sloped at one time and then was regraded.

Marbles. I bought this 50 year old house with a 1/2 acre lot. In my first year, I was planting shrubs and creating flower beds, and in doing that work dug up at least five marbles in separate locations. In fact, I bought some large rhodies and paid to have the nursery haul and plant them. The guy was walking across the front area, under a Norway Maple; therefore, no grass, and he stooped down and picked up a marble.

These marbles are not located in the same quadrant of the yard. My first clue was a marble paved into the macadem driveway. Do you suppose the builder of the lot peppered the yard with them 50 years ago and then left a trademark of one on the drive. Anyway, it's neat, because I feel like they are all coming back home to a single collection.

A bong! I was cleaning up around a bromeliad bed on our new property when I saw what looked like a little blue snake with an eye on it. At first I was concerned it was alive. Eventually I reached for it and discovered a beautifully crafted ceramic thing. Being straight laced as a teen, I didn't know what it was and showed it to my husband. He laughed and filled me in. Interesting discovery. The neighbors had told us there had been wild parties there with several police raids.

We built a house in 1969 on property that my Dh Great Grand Father had homesteaded. The property joining our place had belonged to another family, and a tornado had killed the whole family in 1914. Right after we moved in I was diging a flower bed and dug up a ceramic doll about the size of a baby, I almost had heart failure until i realized a baby could not look that well after that long a time. then I raked it out of the hole and picked it up. But I still don't have a flower bed next to the property line.

Well, it's not what I dug up, but the police department! One day, a homicide detective shows up and tells my now ex-husband and I that they have discovered (through years old evidence/witnesses/etc.) that our backyard was the site of a double homicide that ocurred 15 years prior. The crime happened on our property, which was then an orange grove, and they wanted to dig 7-10 feet down for evidence! Well, they came in with back hoes, machinery, and a slew of crime scene people. They dug, and dug, and dug. It was all very interesting and very creepy. Fortunately for us, we had previously contracted a carpenter to build a two-level deck that same week. We were able to reschedule the carpenter, or else the police would have had to tear up the whole thing!

After that, I was always creeped out to go in the back yard at night. Made very interesting ghost stories for Halloween though! This was all about 10 years ago.

A gold tooth! I was renting an old garage that had been converted into an apartment and built a flower bed along the width of it. Someone told me that burying a tooth is tradition in some cultures but for all I know they could have been blowing smoke.

My most astonishing discovery to date wasn't below ground, but inside a long-neglected boxwood hedge. About a month after I moved into my house, I decided to clean out several years'(!) worth of dead leaves that had been allowed to accumulate in and under a 50' hedge at the back of my newly-purchased yard. The hedge was so jammed that you literally could not see a glimmer of light. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, eventually taking out 30 huge bags of leaves. As well as a toy firetruck the size of a small CHILD! Noooo kidding! Turned out the toy belonged to the next door neighbors who had lent it to the previous occupants years earlier. "We always wondered what the heck happened to that thing!!"

My house also happens to be sited on land that was once the dump for a turn-of-the-century hotel that no longer exists. While digging new garden beds, I've churned up bits of china and glass--nothing major. I'm planning to do some serious excavation next summer and expect I'll come up with more than a few oldies but goodies.

Hundreds of clay pots buried under years of leaves that turned to soil from the previous owner who was a cemetary landscaper years ago. Not in my yard, but on the beach, washed up a platic container full of old dentures. We figured they were thrown into the bay with someone's ashes when they died. Spooooky.

When they excavated for the basement of our house,4 graves were found. We live in Dodge City in the place they think was the old original Boot Hill. 3 years ago whenwe were having a new fence put in, the guy came to the door and told me he was having trouble digging a hole for a fence post. Sure enough when we dug down there was an old tombstone. We moved the post hole. 6 years ago I lost the diamond out of my engagement ring.Maybe someday Ill find it.

I haven't found anything especially valuable, disturbing, interesting as arrow heads or as charming as sbabanna's tooth fairy's bottle.

The house is over 100 years old so it wasn't too surprising to find a buffalo nickel and a Mercury dime and so many marbles that I just leave them in the ground. The mule shoe kinda threw me. Even tho' I've been assured that it isn't a horse shoe; IÂve carried it in the car ever since just for good luck.

Digit

Some antiques: beautiful crystalline-looking marbles (cobalt blue, clear, pearlescent), toy metal cars with chipped enamel paint, ivory and shell buttons, a plastic toy sailboat, and a perfectly intact and usable (though I did not use it) six-year-old chapstick.

cranebill

We found a safe! Not a little household safe, but a big old four by six foot bank safe circa 1890! The area we live in was famous for bootlegging, and we think there might be a connection. It was rusted through in the back, and empty, alas. It weighed about a ton! Made an interesting garden fixture.
I also found a beautiful old bone handled knife, a couple of old irons, and lots of car parts. Happy digging! Amy

A pair of scissors which I leave in the flowerbed where I found them.

Big chunks of asphalt--have continued to find them periodically for over 20 years.

We weren't actually digging but pruning trees and found a tombstone at the tree line on our property. It was face down so we thought it was a concrete bench top until we raked the leaves off.

Kind of an eerie feeling to find this. I immediately ran across the street to my neighbor who has lived in the neighborhood from the beginning of time and asked if someone was burried there. Thank God it wasn't a grave. I guess someone stole it and left it there at some point.

If anyone is missing a loved one's tombstone I might be able to help you locate it. This one is currently being held at the county judicial complex. It's been there for about 3 years. Not sure how long it had been in my yard before we moved in.

Last year as I was getting rid of the grass and digging around the dirt, I found one of those 'Homies' plasic figurines! I don't know if anyone is familiar with them, but they are characters that come in little plastic figurines and stickers and you can get them in gumball machine type machines in grocery stores. They are sort of 'gangstery',cholo-type characters, very 'urban', and cartoonish. I thought it was funny that I found one buried in the soil in my yard!
Brian

I used to live in the country on former farm land. I was digging and levelling a space for my new shed and found an antique blue medecine bottle. This spot was nowhere near any old buildings so it was quite a find. I set it on a pile of dirt and continued working. You guessed it... I accidentally re-buried it! LOL! I've since moved and always wonder if it's still there.

Rolande

With several of my plants, I have planted a few things. I wonder years from now, if someone will be digging, and "find" my items? For example, with one of my rosemary's I "planted" a double terminated crystal. With one of my sea lavender's I "planted" some sea shells we brought back from the coast. Now, I wonder if somewhere down the line someone else will find what I have planted when they dig?

The most unusual thing I ever found was a silver 50-cent piece that must have been dropped about the time my home at the time was built (1917).

As for what I've lost, it's an ongoing thing: I'm perpetually mislaying one or the other of my two cast-aluminum garden trowels. I usually find the lost one the following weekend when I'm planting or dividing or just cleaning up (again).

Lisa

LuvMyDucks,

Be careful with that yellow glass bowl... they once used uranium to color glass yellow before they knew much about radioactivity! Some of those items are still hot!

A kitchen sink.

While digging a hole approximately 2 feet deep and six feet long to install a fiberglass fish pool, a nosy neighbor called the police department, because she thought I was burying a bathtub. She's long-gone, but the BATHTUB is still there!

My husband's ex wife's engagement ring! I was creating a new flower bed under some big trees and had been digging up a lot of weeds and debris. Later that day my husband and I took our coffee down there and sat chatting for a while, when suddenly something shiny caught his eye. I had been looking at it to but thought it was aluminum foil or a bottle top, but his curiosity got the better of him and when he picked it up, and showed me the ring, caked in dirt, I just assumed it was a trinket left by one of the girls years ago (having already found a few Fisher-Price Little People). Of course he knew what it was immediately! She had lost it about 20 years ago and they had searched all over the house for it, finally filing an insurance claim!

When we told the rest of the family, his younger daughter looked a little sheepish and said yes, she remembered playing with her mum's ring in the back yard, LOL.

Ex was thrilled to have it again, regardless :) Don't tell the insurance company!!

Just yesterday I finished cleaning up a five year-old compost heap and lo and behold one of our favorite paring knives. Steve in Baltimore

A beautiful piece of multicolored glass that turned out to be a crack pipe.
That's FOUND! NOT lost! and NOT both! LOL!

I found my sunglasses yesterday - yipppppeeeee!

I'm so jealous! My yard is concrete, so I use containers, usually with bought soil in plastic bags. On the other hand, I have, of course, found tiny little shells in them occasionally, but my only significant find came from my "compost pile," which was really just old weeds and plants stuffed into a falling-apart plastic container. I'm not sure what it is, but it looks like the jawbone of a squirrel or a rat -- maybe a mice! Then again, it might just be another piece of a shell, but, well, that's just too boring, so I'm sticking with a jawbone! It now stays on the edge of one of my containers, and I have to pick it up after bad storms -- if I can find it. LOL

Anyone ever consider starting a garden museum and filling it with the items listed on this thread? I'd pay to see it all! (OK, so the jawbone I can see for free. LOL)

Plastic plates, spoons, and lots of soda cans mixed in a soil by the builders.
My house is 10 years old, and recently I have decided to eliminate bushes upfront, and work the soil to create a new flower bed. That is where I have dugged up those "treasures".

My grandmother lost her wedding ring picking peas and the next year granddaddy found it plowing with a mule.

I found a little brown glass bottle,and my tupperware orange peelers in the compost, along with my knives, and some spoons. Someone keeps throwing them out with the compost! The bottle was found in the garden. :) Arum

I couldn't find my good pruners about 3 months ago right after I transplanted a few shrubs. I searched and searched and searched......well I ended up buying a new pair. Then about 2 weeks ago I was turning the soil over with a little hand rake and voila! Up came my lost pruners...now all rusted, stiff, dull and useless. And they were only buried beneath about a quarter of an inch of soil. But then there were those downpours we had.

I have found a small blue medicine bottle and a small ink bottle. My house is over 100 years old so there is tons of glass in the ground. I also found lots of peach pits, strangely.

I've found all sorts of things:

rusty old Roy Rogers cap gun
forks, spoons
a dolls head
a small ceramic tea cup
auto parts - shocks, tire jack, part of tire rim
various length chains
beer and soda bottles
lots of broken glass
chunks of asphalt and concrete
rolled up bales of telephone wire
6-foot crow bar
various unknown pieces of rusty metal
and my favorite - there is a piece of rebar sticking up out of the ground, by the base of a tree, attached to something - I have dug down about 18 inches (very hard digging - gravel and clay soil), and that rebar is not coming out !

The back section of my property was once used to store the city road maintenance equipment. I also found out the grandfather of the kids next door used to play cowboys and indians with his pals on my property, back when it was all scrubby woods - that at least explains the cap gun !

I found,a big tooth not sure horse maybe,an arrow head,a top part of a jug,a metal rim of a wagon wheel.Lost a diamond pendant.Still looking

My Felcos...they're out there somewhere.

I forgot when we bought this property ,a 1700 farmhouse near Gettysburg battle fields.we were told they found something on our farm that pertained to civilwar .They think it was from desserters of war.We never heard what but while digging we found a big bone like from knee to foot..
One of our deeds says a col.George Himes owned this house in 1800.We have deed with his name signed on it.

Today while in the backyard getting ready for spring, I found plastic bags, spoons and a white lego o_O Wonder what else Ill find as I continue this year?

Years ago, in a garden pile (compost???) in my grandmas backyard, I found half of the bottom piece of a raccoon jaw ^_^

I've only had this house for a year, and it's only 36 years old. I haven't found anything near as exciting as some of you have.

While digging for potatoes last fall, I found a peanut. I don't remember the peanut being there when I planted the potatoes.

I found a number of balls in my yard when I moved in, and behind/under some bushes I found a cat collar for "T.J." No cat. Just the collar.

Last year, one area of my yard was covered in knee-high weeds. In the middle was a pile of brush, dead branches, leaves, etc. Since there were a lot of wasps hanging around the area, I left it alone, afraid there might be a nest. A couple weeks ago, while it was still too cold for insects, I started moving the debris pile.

And beneath it I found a circular brick lined flower bed! Just the perfect spot for my leftover bulbs.

Mainly when I dig what I find is that awful black plastic. It doesn't break down, and I can't plant through it.

Yesterday while I was cleaning up one of our beds out front, I pulled up a clump of grass and discovered a bottle of nail polish (it still had polish in it) thats been there lord knows how long!

A house I formerly lived in was an early nineteenth-century stone farmhouse. When my housemates were breaking ground for an extensive vegetable garden, they found three tombstones scattered in an old field on the property - a mother's and father's, presumably, and a much smaller stone for a child. These were almost certainly marking the grave sites of the original residents. I can't remember if the incriptions were legible or what they might have been. The tombstones were the very thin ones typical of very old graveyards in my area. They gave the stones place of honor in the main room of the farmhouse near its hearth. It sounds macabre to some, I suppose, but we all felt like they kind of belonged there, and that the family they belonged to became a kind of presence in the house once again. I've long lost contact with those housemates but did learn that they moved on. I do hope that the tombstones remained on the property or were taken to a local historical society.

cranebill

I once found a 1934 silver dollar. And the remains of an old house that I was told had burned down in the 1930's. Lots of glass shards, metal parts of a cook stove, bricks, square nails, etc.

Hi again,

Yesterday I was digging a new perennial out of its nursery pot, and found a Snapple lid embedded in the bottom of it. I'm guessing it was inadvertently dropped there by a thirsty nursery worker when it was being potted up. And did you know that "At birth, a Dalmation is always white"? - Snapple "Real Fact #115 provided on the inside of the lid.

cranebill

I was digging a hole for a plant, and came across a steak knife with a wooden handle. My guess is the prior owner of my house (He was quite a gardener) was using it for cutting some vegetation and laid it down and forgot it was there.

Glass. Broken glass. Flat pieces, bits of bottles. Pounds of glass... The space (a ten by 30 enclosed side yard) hadn't been used for anything like a garden possibly since the house was built in 1926, and I had to excavate to build a 30' raised planter and lay an irrigation system. Just about every shovel-full would yield pieces - and when I found three at once, I'd make a wish (I always wished for no more glass, but it never came true!)

After an unknown period as a private residence, the house became a boarding house for the shipbuilders in Oakland during WWII, then separated into two apartments (it's a three-story townhouse) some time in the 1960's. I can only guess the yard was used casually by the later inhabitants as a convenient place to break glass - which is still (unfortunately) a popular pastime in my 'hood (West Oakland).

Lots and lots of broken glass. I have only found three whole bottles. all very small. one blue, two clear glass. One was an old ink bottle with red ink in it. the blue one was an old medicine bottle. It was really fun to find them since i collect old bottles. I also find marbles quite often. I also found a chunk of playdo once. Probably from when my brothers and i were little

i have found two arrowheads in my whole life.i was digging a hole to plant pampas grass and dug up perfect white arrowhead;later on that day in a totally opposite corner of yard ,dug up perfect flint arrowhead.so strange cuz they are the only arrowheads i've ever found.

I found a bottle bottom in our yard while digging for the garden after moving in; it read in raised glass numbers: 1927. Also I found something while gardening in someone else's yard, a bottle stopper, ceramic & cork with an 189? date (I forget the last numeral at the monment). This year while cutting a new garden plot, I found a long gold necklace chain. That I am sure is not old like the other things. We have also found the old square-type nails, all kinds of glass & ceramic, and a knife. All these in our yard.
My daughter especially loves the archaeology gardening here.
Robin

found this while digging in the back garden anyone identify it

piece of meteorite? Iron?