The ''Squirting cucumber cache'' or Lots and lots of crusty coins!

[yaxthri]

Hi fellow TNeters.
Today is the first day of my Summer vacation. I decided to rise early and take a walk on the seashore cliffs at my hometown in Attica, Greece.
As I may have written before there was a huge devastating wildfire last year so almost all of the coastal vegetation, trees, shrubs, bushes were burnt to the ground, it's a real sad sight, everything black and charred.
There's one ''positive'' aspect to this sad story though, lots of relics and trash got washed out during last Winter and are now waiting for someone to find them. I have been finding coins from time to time, really crusty ones, that have been lying under the bushes for some time before the fire came and baked them black.
Today after finding a couple of coins I sat down where I was at that moment and I took a better look around.
There were lots of broken glass, bottles, old porcelain fuses lying around and at one particular spot, under a squirting cucumber bush*, I started finding one coin after the other. I got my pocketknife out and started digging in the burnt earth, not deep, about an inch or so and found even more coins.
Some time later the sun got higher and I decided to leave, I will go back tomorrow I think and definitely after the next rain...
My ''haul'', 101 crusty (or very crusty) coins, 2 very damaged ones, 2 telephone tokens and 4 more coins that I found in the vicinity, not part of the ''cache''.





The square handle could be associated, the coins were surrounded by parts of rusted metal (maybe the remains of a box?), the cross like thingy was there, too, I have no idea what this is...
I have them now immersed in olive oil, I'll leave them soack in it over night before trying to clean them a little in the morning.
A couple ones I checked have dates from 1909 to 1969, I'm still hoping some coins -I'm betting my money on the really small ones- will be silver or some of them could be old and rare ones, who knows?...
I'm very excited, even if this turns out to just be a kids coin collection that was thrown out during some renovation work and not my first semi-dug cache I thought (all my finds are surface/eyeball finds), but I'll keep posting fresh info and pics as I start cleaning them up.
Wish me luck and happy hunting to you all!



*A ''squirting cucmber'' or ''bitter cucumber'' is a wild poisonous but fun plant (Ecballium elaterium) that grows wild in these parts of the world, google it up if you like...

 

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[yaxthri]

Hello again.
I have been back from our family vaccation trip and I had to find enough time to clean and identify all my finds.
So I went back to the Cache spot a 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] time, even more coinsto clean and ID, hahaha. I'm glad I did, I found another dozen of coins, this time a took a sifter with me, like some fellow TNeter had suggested, it came in handy. This is the first time I actually had to dig to find some coins, another first one for me... Here they are , the ''dirty dozen''...




I started cleaning , I sure should have read my little book for coin-cleaning before immersing them in olive oil for so many days, it took a lot of elbow grease getting the grease off them...

The final results are pretty exciting, although most of the coins are still very corroded after cleaning. I have a theory about that. They must had been kept in an iron container, many have rust stains apart from their own corrosion coatings. As all the different metal coins were inside that container water kept seeping in. The place had a mixed bush, brush and pine-tree vegetation growing there (before the wildfire last year burnt everything down). Pine-trees make the soil they grow on acidic, so the lightly acidic ground water that dripped into the container acted like battery fluid, the whole container was like a big battery, corrosion was promoted by the electrolysis. That explains, I think, why most aluminium coins are almost completely destroyed (most of the unidentifiables are aluminium ones).


So the final tally, a picture of the whole lot.






154 coins, 145 Ided ones (I will attach a PDF list in case anybody wants to read more), 9 unidentifiables due to corrosion, 1 museum quality ancient coin replica, 1 french trading jeton, 2 italian telephone jetons.
The coins come from 25 countries (mostly European countries, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Marocco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, USA and 5 countries not existing anymore the Austrohungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Protectorate of Palestine, West Germany and Yugoslavia). Lots of US coins but no ''junk silver''unfortunately...

View attachment The_Squirting Cucumber Cache- Coin Collection.pdf [SUB][SUP]
[/SUP][/SUB]
This was definetely a coin collection somebody hid or threw out by mistake, but it's not a kid's coin collection, in my opinion. The coins dates range from 1876 to 1990.
There's a hand struck (hammered) bronze 4 Falus coin from Marocco with the hijri date 1284 on it (that's 1897in our calendar though...). Here it is together with the French Commerce chamber 50 Centimes trading jeton.






I did find silver coins, 4 of them! I was wrong about the small coins I expected to be silver, 3 of them are pretty large, 2.3cm (a little less than an inch) in diameter.
Two one Drachma coins from 1910 with King George the 4[SUP]th[/SUP] on one side and a triton rider onthe other side, a 1 Frank from Belgium with King Albert on one sideand the aforementionted museum quality King Alexander coin replica, cast in silver.
Kings Albert and Alexander came out of the soil looking still good, the two greek King George coins had to be cleaned a little but they are in good shape, too!
Some pics here for you to see (with before and after shots).










And here they are, all my silver coins in one shot.



The mandatory kitchen paper-towel shots, hahaha.


So all in all a great search, I am still very excited about my finds, lots of stories behind these coins, a mystery how they got there.
I will go back again soon because I still have not found the source of all these coins that look like they have spilled out somewhere, tumbling downhill the burnt cliffs to the spot I found them. And I hope I will and if not I hope I will find a couple of coins every now and then until... I do find the source!! I will keep posting any new finds, I promise.

Cheers and happy hunting to all of you.

 

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[cudamark]

I suspect that there was a house or cabin nearby that burned down in the same fire. The coins were probably in the house and spilled out with their container when it burned.

 

[BillA]

a hut of wood, perhaps but unlikely
houses are of stone or cement

nice collection

 

[CreakyDigger]

If I ever start a garage band, I'm naming it "Squirting Cucumber Bush."

 

[Blak bart]

Great work yaxthri !! I really enjoyed your thread. Good luck in the future searching for the source. Thanks for the thread !!

 

[Greastart]

You need to get yourself a metal detector!

what he said!

 

[yaxthri]

So I went back... again. Only this time was a little disappointing for me.
No coins this time, not one which either means I did a great job on my previous visits or I was looking in the wrong place.
And I probably found part of the ''source''. I found part of the completely rusted lid of a cash box. Remember he square handle thing in my first pics? That is the cash box handle as it turns out, check out the pics.






Despite all my efforts I could not locate the bottom part, not even part of it, or maybe the missing top part...
So I'm guessing I came second and someone else got the ''goodies'', meaning the valuable coins or whatever was in the box, before me.
Maybe one of the loggers that worked on the site, cutting down the burnt down tree trunks and branches and removing them after the fire...
Or maybe I'm guessing wrong and the bottom part is still buried in the ground waiting for a flush flood after the first rain to get uncovered for me to find!...

Still hoping.
Thanks for all replies, Goodnight y' all

 

[yaxthri]

Awesome haul and I bet there are many more coins and other finds! I hope no one was hurt or worse in the wildfires!

I'm afraid 102 people died in that fire last year, it's the worst ever I can remember...

 

[Reanm8er]

Thanks yaxthri and congrats!

 

[yaxthri]

Finding wheaties in Greece

There was this thread lately on TNet about some "wheaties" found in coin rolls So I decided to look through the US coins I found in my "coin collection cache" and yes 5 of the pennies are wheaties: 1910-44-45-56-57D, in "crusty" condition, not really treasure but I took some pics just for the heck of it.




Any suggestions on making cleaning them up, making them a little more presentable?
Some of them have real patina-coats...

 

[Georgivs]

Nice finds! I'll have to add the squirting cucumber to my malevolent plant garden, along with stinging nettles, trifoliate oranges, and poison ivy.

 

[BillA]

don't forget triffids

 

[cudamark]

None of those wheat back Lincoln cents have any collector value, unless the 1910 is an "S" (San Francisco) mint. If you want to shine them up and give them a copper colored appearance, soak them in some cheap white vinegar for a couple of hours and then rub them with baking soda. After that, rinse them in water. Repeat as necessary to get them looking the way you want. You can also use electrolysis or copper cleaner to clean them too. Whichever method you use, you will lose some detail off the coin, so, take it slow and accept the fact that they will never look like new.

 

[yaxthri]

Ok cudamark, thanks for the tip.
I think I will leave them be, just like I did with the rest of the other collection coins.
I looked them up on cointrackers, I just like finding odd stuff over here :-)

Happy Hunting Y'all