Even more backyard treasure!

When my dad was digging the trench for our new drainage pipe, he just kept running into all sorts of things. Chunks of concrete, old bricks, rocks, plastic bags, trash, etc. This is the norm around here. You can't stick a shovel down more than about six inches without hitting something.

So let's have a little show and tell so you can see what we found this time.

First, like I said. Loads of broken concrete, rocks, etc. Enough to fill those three plastic flowerpots. I know it's hard to judge the scale of things in photos, but I can barely lift any one of these plastic pots. I wrote "buckets" above, but they are 2.25 gallon flowerpots I'm re-purposing for rock storage.

And then there's the more exciting stuff. The pretty stuff.

Pieces of a green ceramic bowl. It seems so strange to think that the course of action for a broken bowl would be to bury it on the side of the house, but I suppose it's almost the same as what we do now. We just do it communily, with trucks and pick ups and a heck of a lot more garbage.

And a retro Pepsi cap in perfect condition. I thought this was old given the short ingredient list, but according to Wikipedia, this logo was in use from 1970 to 1997, so maybe it's not all that old.

And since I'm on the subject of buried treasure, I'll show you what else I dug up a week or two ago while transplanting some perennials. An old rotting timber! Exciting! My resident backyard woodpecker was so happy with me for digging this up.

I know it looks like it just shot up out of the ground, but it was horizontal underground and I lifted one end up 90 degrees. Elise is about three feet tall, and I think the fence is around six feet, so that gives you an idea of how big this thing was.

Want to see what else I've found in my backyard over the years? Of course you do! Click here!

Glass, glass and more glass: More backyard finds

I mentioned before that I've found shards of glass in our backyard. Every time I dig a hole to plant something, I unearth some. And every time it rains, I can expect to find a few new pieces exposed on the surface of the dirt. I actually challenge myself to find at least two or three pieces every time I'm in the backyard. 

Maybe that's silly, but I would feel terrible if Elise got a hold of a piece and cut herself. She's a tight-fisted clutcher of small objects, and I can picture her grabbing a shard and slicing her little hand. Ouch!

Honestly, I thought I'd gotten most of it as my hunts produced fewer and fewer specimens.

But then... I hit the mother lode and dug up so much glass it filled a plastic dish tub. The source was in the back corner of our lot, likely our property's personal landfill from back in the day. I kept digging until I couldn't find any more, but after many hours, I was done with dirt for a while and cordoned off an adjacent area for future exploration.

More backyard treasures

With all the yardwork we've been doing, we've been uncovering a lot of treasures (trash?). Our house is 81 years old, so it's anyone's guess what might be lurking under the surface of the dirt. In some cases, I couldn't even get a shovel down more than a few inches without hitting something.

It's been kind of like a treasure hunt/excavation site, and although it's worthless junk, it's still kind of fun. All of you with newer houses, apartments and condos are going to be totally jealous by the end of this post.

Concrete, concrete and more concrete, mostly in small chunks. This is just the beginning. What I've found so far probably would fill a five-gallon bucket and there's more to be found for sure. I've also found lots of crumbling terra cotta pavers and some broken bricks.

And then there's the treacherous stuff.

More glass shards than a toddler's backyard should contain...

This photo is completely unstaged. Really!

And a rusty saw blade.

And then there's the big stuff...

A three-foot length of cast iron pipe

A huge chunk of concrete (lower left) and a two to three foot piece of a concrete curb. I suspect there's another piece down there, but I was too lazy to dig it out that day.

And a few more interesting things...

A ceramic beer bottle stopper, a white hexagonal tile (weird because this was not the original tile in our bathroom) and a decaying rubber ball.

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See some of the other weird things I found in my backyard last year.

My Weird Backyard

Our backyard has been long neglected. Definitely for longer than we've lived here, so I don't feel totally guilty about how it looks. More on that in a later post.

My dad surprised me this weekend by cleaning out some recurring vegetation and found a couple of "treasures."

 

The first is a poured concrete basin, two to three feet in diameter. Small bits of it were sticking up above ground, but we had no idea what it might turn out to be. I guess someone long ago had a decorative fish pond flanked by an assortment of geodes, which we have found in abundance. Classy.

The second is an old leather dog collar, caked with dirt, the tag reading "Puddy." I'm not sure when it is from, but it was after the advent of area codes. Also, I'm not sure if any of you have looked at a map recently, but Massachusetts is nowhere near Missouri. This doggie was a long way from home.

Finding this collar is funny and slightly worrisome because a couple of months ago I found a nylon cat collar in approximately the same location. It was more modern than this one. I figured some cat passing through snagged it on a tree and it broke away (as cat collars are designed to do). Now I'm not sure what it was doing there.

I really, really hope we are not the owners of a pet cemetery.