So I’ve been digging, trying to get rid of all the weeds and particularly giant rooted docks and nettles, and actually while I was putting up the bamboo screen at the bottom of the garden I noticed there were some bricks under all the soil, so I decided to start at the fence and work back up towards the middle of the garden. This bottom bit is about 9m long by 5m wide, and all nettles and docks and dandelions.
So anyway, I start digging, I find bricks, I keep digging, I find concrete? I start to wonder if maybe there are some slabs buried under there, I keep digging along, and would you believe what I found under this amount of dirt and weeds (about 6 inches or so deep) :
Yup a big bit of concrete!
What it looks like to me is possibly an old concrete/cement base for a shed or something, especially given that my next door neighbour still has an old asbestos shed in the same position. These houses are over 100 years old and people have been gardening in these back yards for at least that long, so at some point, someone has decided to dump a load of top soil on top of this and hide it instead of digging it up. I know it doesn’t look the best and it’s certainly not brand new, but I kinda like it. I like that it’s a bit like crazy paving gone wrong, and I like that I’ve unearthed (pun intended) something from the gardening past. As there is a path that runs down the left hand side of the garden but stops a couple of metres from the bottom, I was faced with having to try and extend the path across to the gate on the right hand side, but now I have a concrete “patio” ready made and that saves me a lot of work.
While I was digging this up and removing all the millions of nettle roots I also found an old crisp packet with a use by date of 1998 and it was in almost perfect condition, which shows you how long a crisp packet will take to break down in a landfill site! Scary stuff!
