It’s that time of year where you want the garden to pop, moved in last year and the border around the rockery was over grown with no definite edge from grass to rockery. Using a half moon spade I defined the border and removed 3 rubble bags of overgrowth, weeds and roots.
In all the soil all the way down is lots of broken crockery and glass some of its blue Japanese and jam jar bases.
Why would it be in there and should I leave it in?
Thinking of chucking some border plants and mulch for athestics.
by Present_Fly_1286
31 Comments
I have often wondered myself.
I put it down to ancestors either having regular fights and/or the by-product of people using such material as drainage in their old pots.
Some people put broken pots, tiles, glass, etc in their beds to deter pests and such. May also just be from an old dumping ground or such. Realistically, I don’t think it’ll do much if you leave it there, nor if you remove it.
We have all sorts in our garden. We dug a new flowered the other day and there was most of an old lawnmower buried! The scrap metal that we’ve had to dispose of is incredible and annoying too. Why did people bury stuff?
We had an old house which had Victorian rubbish buried in the garden.
Wiilow pattern crockery is ubiquitous.
Maybe it was some kind of good luck tradition to smash and bury it ?
My garden must have been the site rubbish dump in the late sixties. In the past I’ve found several scaffold clips, a fully set bag of cement, various milk bottles and what looks like the and of an asbestos stove pipe.. but that was found 2ft down whilst digging a cable trench. I left it in situ being what it was and too far down to be disturbed by normal gardening activities.
Did you buy your house off greeks by any chance ?
You have my sympathies between my house and the house. Next door was once a beautiful hedge until it was chopped down in January. They’ve put up an appalling fence that is made of splintering wood and in doing so have exposed glass plastic all kinds of waste that the hedge must have been grown on top of.
Didn’t realise there were any gardens in the uk *without* all this shite in it
Someone explained to me it’s an aid to drainage and helps to warm up the soil. I have no idea if it works. I like finding pieces of pottery. I clean them up, put them in glass jars and try to incorporate them in mosaics when I get the chance.
We’ve also have the same, forever digging up bits of glass and pottery.
Lazy folks. I had glass, metal bits and slate in the ground. I was scared of the bedding area. 🤣
Yep, my London soil is a fabulous mix of clay, broken crockery, bits of glass from beer bottles, chunks of brick, plastic plumbing piping, paint flakes, 1970s cigarette butts, concrete, Victorian clay pipe stems and desiccated rootballs from failed gardening projects gone by.
The highlight was when I found a horse brass!
https://preview.redd.it/3lg515r09czg1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d5e38ca35856b690b46b5fc6a5b71fce39fd7a3e
This is what we recently dug out of our garden! 🤦🏻♀️ there used to be a massive pond which was backfilled with, well, everything. One of ponds had shit loads of polystyrene in it it too 😩
I recently found a crushed Coke (?) can SIX INCHES down under a lawn.
They were probably still putting cocaine in it when that got tossed…
That’s nothing. Wait ’til you find a strange hard blue bit of plastic that you can’t find the end of and realising it’s a filled in pond that will be far too big to dig out!
I found rusty children’s toys buried in mine
We have a 1930’s build and wherever I dig there is a ton of glass and pottery shards …feels like some sort of trick. Filled up several large plant pots of the stuff. Grrrrr
We found these in our back garden when we excavated it a few years ago
https://preview.redd.it/vgtij0b4eczg1.jpeg?width=1536&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4707f9177e071e54185af6109ff4ee7743d160be
If you find very old pieces of glass it’s possible they were from bomb damage during the war. I was told that my house had all the windows blown out during the blitz. Then after the war the council came and plastered over the cracks in the walls!
I once dug up this old book of American stamps, but I chucked them away when I saw the plane was printed upside down
I use broken pots as drainage.
When I dug my garden up for beds I found: a whole greenhouse; the brick base, all the panes, the watering can, a bunch of stuff that he had in there and an entire bicycle (including the dynamo and horn). Well some of the metal had rusted but you could tell what it all was. It wasn’t even earthed up. Just looked like regular grass.
Ive found the usual pottery shards etc. My best finds were a clay pipe and part of a ceramic knee replacement.
That’s nothing. Turns out my garden contained a Native American burial ground
Normal. Random broken glass floats to the top of the beds sometimes.
Welcome to the traditional British garden. 2000 years of crap to dig through!
People used to just burn/bury their rubbish. Pottery doesn’t really break down (it’s one of those things archaeologists find a lot of) so it just built up.
In many areas the night soil men who took the rubbish and outhouse contents for the fields would sell it to farmers. Then they’d spread that on the fields, and so if your house is built on a former edge of town field strong possibility that happened. Now you have lots of crockery bits that you can make a jigsaw of if you’re bored. This is an ancient thing, I had a friend who found Roman Samianware pottery in her garden to my great excitement.
Or. Dig out to your usual working depth. Sift soil. Put the soil back with some compost to compensate for the amount of material removed. Repeat until you’re functionally done.
Our last house was built in the 16th century and we found what appeared to be their rubbish dump out the back of the property near animal sheds. Before the days of regular rubbish collections people disposed of stuff in their own way.
Old build – piles of broken crockery.
New build – piles of demolition rubbish.
I have found many old medicine bottles, crockery, tram and railway uniform buttons and various bits of glass and metal. Also a whole mattress, old toy cars and bits of machinery just from one garden. I think people used to bury things a lot years ago.
Honestly in older areas it’s basically because before the council emptied people’s bins everyone just threw their rubbish in a pile outside and buried it occasionally
Because olden times folk were often dicks and disposed of literally anything in a hole in the ground. Most gardens in the UK have some level of this shit.
The bane of my previous garden was decades old carpet, old paint tins and even a Belfast sink.
I know someone who uncovered a bit of rusty metal, only to find it was still attached to the rest of the car.