Buried treasure in the garden

Most of us gardeners won't dig up anything in our gardens more interesting than potatoes, carrots, worms, or rocks. But for a lucky few, tilling the soil turns up some surprising treasures. One lucky British gardener has unearthed coins, jewelry, and other Victorian treasures in her UK garden. That story reminded me of a friend of mine who bought a house in Tunnel Hill, Georgia, in the early 1990s. When he dug up his garden, he found bayonets and other relics of the Battle of Tunnel Hill.

Unfortunately, I've never found anything that interesting in my garden. We bought our house in 1996, a few months after the property had flooded. When we started working on our washed-out mud slab of a yard, we dug up all sorts of odd things that had been washed there by the floodwaters. We found lots of bottles (and broken pieces of bottles), chunks of asphalt, and my personal favorite: sand bags. Lots of sand bags. 80-lb sand bags, buried just under the surface of my tomato-patch-in-the-making. Since we have heavy clay soil, the sand made a nice soil amendment, but it was backbreaking work to dig up the half-rotted sand bags and disperse the sand. I kept hoping I'd find some cool relic deposited by the floodwaters, but debris and sandbags were it. Maybe I should move back to Georgia.

Nah.