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Old April 18, 2019   #1
GoDawgs
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Default You never know what you'll find...

Today I was prepping some planting holes and ran into/dug up this:



It was 18"x22", about 4" thick and appears to be poured concrete for some kind of footing. This bed area was once the location of an 12' wide mobile home that moved out when we bought the property. About twenty minutes later I found it's twin on the other side of the bed. This is the third year using this area as an additional bed (the Garden Stretcher at work). Last year I found two of these farther down the bed and suspected there might be more but hadn't run into more until today.

I used the mattock to grab the far side, pull it up and flip it towards me while being very careful to keep my feet clear. Then I used the flip technique to move it about 15' away where it's out of the way.
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Old April 18, 2019   #2
DonDuck
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Our home is near the top of a hill the original settlers called Whippoorwill hill because it is heavily wooded and unlike the surrounding area, was never farmed because it is rocky. Over the years, I've found many broken parts from antique farm implements. The hill was so rocky when we moved in, I spent the first spring picking up rocks from 1/4 lb. to 300 lbs. in size to prevent breaking my zero turn mower. I keep about three acres mowed and the remaining area is wooded. I must pick up rocks every spring. They seem to work up from below the soil during the winter and lie exposed to my mower in the spring. Some of the rocks are so large, I dig them up with a pick and pry bar and move them with a tractor and front end loader. My mower has hit what I thought were small rocks which appeared during the winter and found the small rock to be the newly exposed part of a giant rock which required almost a full day to dig out.
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Old April 19, 2019   #3
PlainJane
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Lol, I had a few adventures with both rocks and weird found stuff in my New England garden. Luckily my DH was very ingenious in coming up with removal strategies. Our neighbors were frequently amused.
The house was relatively new for the neighborhood- 1940 - but was on an old pig farm. The landowners home was still there across the street, circa 1860’s and still going strong. The barn next to it was a thing of beauty too. Miss all that.
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Old April 19, 2019   #4
PhilaGardener
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I've found the easiest way to move slabs like that is to cut a cheap PVC pipe into 2 ft sections and then use them as rollers. You will be amazed how easily you can roll that along - sure beats the flip method, and far safer, and you will find a bunch of uses for slabs like that (curbs, walkways, walls, even raised bed edges).
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Old April 19, 2019   #5
Worth1
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I found an old rusty pipe wrench one time, cleaned it up and I use it.
It dates back to the 20's.
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Old April 19, 2019   #6
clkeiper
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Worth1 View Post
I found an old rusty pipe wrench one time, cleaned it up and I use it.
It dates back to the 20's.
I walked down the road the other day to retrieve a piece of plastic that had blown away from my garden when we were working on laying plastic... I found a craftsman ratchet and socket in the ditch.

GoDawgs, use those piers or whatever they are as stepping stones in a path. especially if you have a wet spot somewhere.
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Last edited by clkeiper; April 19, 2019 at 07:42 AM.
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Old April 19, 2019   #7
ScottinAtlanta
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I found a hand forged slave hoe in my garden, and some Civil War minie bullets. The ground is full of stuff!
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Old April 19, 2019   #8
GoDawgs
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This place is a never-ending treasure hunt. The original house that was on the place was over 120 years old and a severely patched up thing that was eventually torn down when we built the new house farther up the hill. The house was built on hand-hewn timbers about 10-12" square and giant mortise and tenon joints.

One year Pickles dug up two huge tractor wheel weights! They were given to a guy just to move them and take them away. There were also the remains of a small concrete block making machine up in the back in the weeds. Stuff everywhere you sink a shovel.

There are still eight footings from what was supposed to be an old syrup mill. They look to have been made from concrete-filled nail kegs and are buried halfway into the ground.

One day I will have to go to the county office and trace back the history of this place so I can look at the old plats. This place was once part of a 1200 acre grant given to a local family (they're still around) by King George III during colonial times.
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Old April 19, 2019   #9
Worth1
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This was years ago when I was a kid.
There were old places everywhere in the woods where people lived.
One time I saw something glass like barely sticking up out of the soil.
On farther inspection it was an old glass lemon juicer.

Took it home washed it and we used it for a long time.
I have no idea where it went after I left home.
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Old April 19, 2019   #10
bower
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Gotta love the mattock for rustling up some treasures!

Old tools are always cool to find, and around here you can spot the old gardens in the forest, by the huge piles of rocks they dug out of it in order to grow a crop.



One time a friend and I tried to dig a well on the upper part of the property. The spot that we picked turned out to be a pile of boulders, pretty big rock anyway maybe the size of your slabs but different shapes. My friend is really strong and he hauled out all these big rocks till we got down about three and a half feet, and there he found an old liquor bottle broken in a few pieces.. This completely blew our minds since it was not a farm area and we could only imagine the bottle was very old to be so far down in the ground. I always meant to get someone to look at, and tell me the vintage of this thing.
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