How Can I Sell You Your Own Land, With A Riddle… ?

Reasons to be well grounded. ..
Having just renovated another house, we were recommended a landscape gardener to finish the garden.  “Oh that soil of yours is full of stones and clay, no good to ‘no-one'”. Announced the gardener authoritatively.  “We’ll need to cart away that rubbish soil of yours and deliver some proper topsoil, it’s the only way!”.

Foolishly, I agreed to pay for the removal of our old earth and the delivery of a couple of lorry loads of new top soil.  I arrived towards the end of the work.

… Tales of the unexpected:
It was firstly disappointing not to be able to find my new concreted rotary clothes post.    This had clearly been forcibly removed to prevent it acting as a depth gauge betraying the lack of soil ‘not delivered’. The lorry had a small heap of stones on board but the garden was now ‘finished’.

Logically the stones would first have had to be removed before the new topsoil arrived.  And, with the stones still on board, I could not reconcile how they had managed to deliver the new top soil in the same lorry?  I could not help but notice the similarity of the colour of the relatively small quantity of “rubbish soil” mixed with the equally smallish pile of stones still on the back of the lorry.

This old rubbish soil was remarkably similar in colour and texture to that of the ‘new’ garden topsoil.  More remarkably the ‘new’ garden top soil even included the same colour stones and clay.  Such dedication to deliver soil exactly matching my own!

The depth was also amazingly shallow?  I was not about to buy my own soil after they had riddled it through a sieve.  Accordingly they were paid for riddling the stones and I removed the remaining stones with a rake.

I also had to buy a new rotary clothes post!