Unusual garden finds

What's the most unusual thing you've found in your garden? Up until last week, I would have said the tomato that had the profile of Pinocchio after he told a great many lies. But recently while digging out some ferns, I uncovered an old corked bottle.

That in and of itself isn't so odd to me -- it was close to a garage foundation where you might expect some discarded household goods to turn up. And while digging out a pathway around our raised beds we ran across a number of small items like marbles and old-fashioned hair barrettes.

The bottle was in a spot where I'd dug down at least that deep before in an attempt to eradicate an invasive spreader, fine combing the soil for remnant roots, so it's surprising I didn't run across it then. Perhaps glass bottles, like rocks in farm fields, are subject to frost heave, and this winter seems to have produced a bumper crop of the latter, judging by a drive through southern Minnesota.

Considering how little care I was taking with the roots of the expansionist ferns, I'm lucky I didn't break the bottle. It contains a bit of murky looking liquid that probably seeped by the cork, so it's not exactly mantel-display ready, but it was still kind of cool to turn up something that relates to someone else's roots while digging out fern roots.

What's the oddest, coolest, quirkiest thing you've ever found in your garden?