Usual Wednesday passing. I dropped off and spread another bin of Xmas tree shreddings to fill a gap in the path.
Immediately after that I dug a hole on a sloping patch at the back of the Guerrilla allotment and planted Picea Conica glauca, that my Girlfriend used as miniature potted Christmas tree. First slapping some Microrhizal fungi granules on the sides.
Then a Hypericum shrub nearby and next to an Elleagnus plant that I grew from seed some years back. On that slope there is also a couple of small Acer Palmatum trees. One Green and one Purple.
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Also recently I rediscovered a Lime green Cornus or dogwood plant that I planted some years now on the Stairway slope. This corns can only have come from Gowlland Close, where the planted up the new estate with Birch Trees and two different types of Cornus. The Lime green one and Siberica Alba.
Pretty much immediate all these trees and shrubs were systematically uprooted and thrown over the old chain link fence onto the former railway. This was 2004 before that section of trackbed had been converted into a Public park. This stretch being Phase2 today.
It was also that time in 2004 that I found the first of two Cast iron Upper quadrant signal lamp cases. This one probably dating between 1922 and 1948, during british rail days. At some point it had been converted to electric power or possibly battery power. Lamps like this would have originally have used a smelly red coloured long burning oil. I have been told by my Grandpa Rex of who used to work on the railways himself as Signalman.
Ok right , gone off topic here , thats just like me.
The Green cornus has layered branches over the passing years to create new plants. it might be an idea for me to separate with loppers and move some of these smaller plants to other positions on the site.
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After finishing with the Guerrilla allotment I took the bike and trailer to the other side of the Road/Rail bridge and had another look at the top of the low cutting , and using a three pronged hand rake/cultivator. Proceeded to removed soil from under where the Cast iron cistern was that I removed. I found pretty much nothing but saturated soil as it tipped with rain and blew gusts all around.
A small glass bottle was found on top of the spoil heap that I had just vacated from the hole, and to the right I came up an area I had already checked for broken glass. Indeed I had a plastic bag, and I tend to remove any broken glass I find anyway, because there is a school nearby that one of the main entrances tips out onto the Rly pk itself. And in the past Children keep climbing this short and steep cutting and up behind the waterlogged ditch below. My mission is to remove as much broken glass from this area as possible to reduce the risk of children going up and sliding back down and as a result cutting themselves on old glass, of which there was a lot of up there.
The small glass bottle turned out to be a complete clear glass shear top ink bottle of which when washed had nice old internally bubbly look with a light free/blue tint.
Digging to the left and behind a vertically buried railway sleeper of which is pretty much rotten now, revealed a 1/2 pint United Dairies milk bottle, buy now the water pouring down from above into the cavity I was exploring, was making a right damp muddy mess of my right arm of which was by now deep behind the old vertical sleeper.
I could feel and hear the tines of the hand cultivator/rake rubbing on glass, but it was a struggle to reach the object and in the worsening weather conditions. There was a broken bottle above the one I was trying to dig out, and it was preventing the what seemed like a complete one from coming out. Now I have to confess this is now longer on the slope where children are frequenting, I am now in unknown territory.
Eventualy the broken bottle came out of it's horizontal position and turned out to be a milk bottle of which went strait into the broken waste glass bag. yet more stretching and hard pressed soil removal resulted in me finally being able to grab hold of the bottom end of a bottle with a now completely saturated leather glove. After much struggling and wobbling from side to side, and with a squelch the bottle finally emerged as a complete wide mouth milk bottle. It was filthy and had yet more sloppy soil internally.
Washing the bottle in the flooded ditch below revealed embossed writing that read Curtis Bros Coulsdon.
I gave this 1pt wide mouth a better scrubbing at The house at Nash's Garden, the place where I do my Voluntary gardening job for the old widow, and found the bottle to be in almost pristine condition.
Later when returning to the flat I sat in front of the computer and looked up Curtis Bros and failed to find any information online about a Coulsdon depot. However it seems the main Dairy was at Streatham ( S London ). More information found said that in 1910, Curtis Bro's and Dumbrell or dumbrill combined, before finally merging with three other dairies in 1917 to Create UD ( united dairies )
This bottle merely has Curtis Bro's ( coulsdon ) on it. Does this mean that the bottle I found is pre 1917