Your ring has not gone anywhere. It fell through the grass and stopped on the soil, usually within a couple of metres of where it came off your hand.
A lawn does not swallow things. It hides them at ankle height — which is good news, because everything that is still on the surface can still be found.
Everything you can see from standing height stops at the dotted line.
Thatch — dead stems between the grass and the soil. The ring drops through the blades and stops here.
Not buried. Lying on the ground, under an inch of grass.
All four take about five minutes, and every one of them protects the search you are about to do.
Not today, not before you have searched. Tell anyone else who cuts that grass — a partner, a parent, a gardener who comes on Thursday.
Walking over the spot presses a small, heavy thing further down into the mat of grass. Rope the area off if children or a dog use it.
Canes, a garden hose laid in a loop, upturned flowerpots. By tomorrow you will remember a bigger patch than it really was.
Gloves off and on, cold water from the hose, sun cream, weeding, lifting a full bag, throwing a ball. Rings come off when hands get cold, wet or greasy.
It does not sink into the soil. It falls between the blades of grass and stops at a layer called thatch — the spongy mat of living and dead stems that sits between the soil and the green leaves. In a healthy lawn that layer is about a centimetre thick; in an old, mossy, never-scarified lawn it is thicker.
So the ring is lying on the ground, one to three centimetres below the tips of the grass. Invisible from standing height. Loud and obvious to a metal detector, which is the whole reason a lawn is considered easy ground rather than hopeless ground.
Time works against you slowly, not quickly. Over a season the grass grows through and over it; over years worm casts and leaf fall bury it properly. Over a weekend it has gone nowhere at all.
Everything else on this page is recoverable. This is not. A rotary mower does not cut a ring in half — it picks it up and launches it.
“A mower can throw objects in any direction. Check the yard before mowing — clear the work area of rocks, bottles and debris that might be thrown by the blades.”
In plain terms: a ring that was in one square metre is now somewhere in the whole garden, or in the grass box, or under a hedge, or on the drive. A search that would have taken twenty minutes becomes a search that may not succeed at all.
The grass box first. Tip it onto a sheet, do not empty it into the bin.
Then the throw. A mower throws in any direction, so this is now the search area.
Then the hard surfaces. On paving a ring is visible, and people heard theirs land.
Not lost. Just harder. Do these in this order, because the order matters.
Low sun is the most underrated tool in the list and it costs nothing. Gold is one of very few things in a garden that throws back a bright, warm, direct reflection, and it only does it when the light hits at the right angle — which is also why the second pass across your own tracks finds things the first pass walked straight over.
The mistake almost everybody makes is not searching badly. It is searching the same third of the lawn three times and another third never, because nothing marks what has been done.
Low sun, early or late, and grass still wet with dew. Kneel rather than stand — from standing height you are looking at the tops of the blades, not the ground.
One genuinely useful trick from the forums, for a small, well-defined patch: stretch an old pair of tights over the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner and vacuum the grass. Anything heavier than a clipping is held against the mesh instead of going into the machine. It is fiddly, it is slow, and on a whole lawn it is hopeless — but on two square metres of short grass it works.
Each of these behaves differently from a lawn, and one of them is better news than grass.
It depends entirely on what you are raking, and the two cases point opposite ways.
Lifting fallen leaves off the top of a lawn is fine, as long as you work from the edges inward and the leaves go onto a sheet you can go through afterwards, not into a bag that leaves the garden. You are moving a layer that sits above the ring.
Dragging a spring-tine rake through the grass itself is the opposite thing. That is what a rake is designed to do — work the thatch — and a small dense object in thatch goes downwards under the tines, not upwards. The same applies to a scarifier, only faster. Rake leaves; leave the lawn alone.
A garden is close to the easiest job a metal detector ever gets. It is small, it has edges, you know roughly where you were, there is no tide and no crowd, and you are not asking anyone's permission to search your own ground — which is not true of a park, a beach or a farmer's field.
One exception worth knowing if you are reading this in Switzerland: detector searching is regulated by canton and all twenty-six require a permit, your own garden included. Elsewhere in German-speaking Europe, your own garden is your own business.
Hiring one is cheap. German rental shops quote around €25 a day, against a deposit of a couple of hundred euros that you get back. A ring is not a difficult target: gold, silver and platinum all conduct well and a lawn puts almost nothing between the coil and the ring. For what a machine can and cannot pick up, this is worth two minutes first — a loose diamond, a stone setting or a plain ceramic band is a different problem entirely.
Here is the honest part, though. The people who do ring recoveries as a hobby write up what they find, and the same story appears over and over in their own accounts of lawn searches: an owner hired a detector, swept the garden for a weekend, found nothing, and gave up — and then somebody who knew the machine found the ring in minutes, near the surface, often a step or two from where the owner said they had been.
That is not a comment on anyone's ability. It is that a borrowed detector is a machine you have never heard before. A thin gold band gives a quiet, low signal sitting right next to the tone you learn to ignore, and the usual beginner mistakes — sweeping too fast, holding the coil too high off the grass, chasing every loud signal — are exactly the ones that miss a wedding ring. Hiring a detector versus asking someone who owns one is a real decision, and for a garden it usually goes the second way.
It happens often: the garden is where you noticed, not where it went. Work backwards through the day and check the ordinary places first — a coat pocket, the soap dish, the car door pocket, the glove you took off, the bedside table, the washing machine drum. If the day included water or sand, a ring lost outdoors away from home is a different search with different rules.
Thatch, and where it sits: Clemson Cooperative Extension. Mowers and thrown objects: Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. Hire prices: German detector rental listings. Lawn recoveries as the people who do them describe them: The Ring Finders.
If you have been over the grass twice and found nothing, the next step is somebody with a detector — and a garden is about the easiest thing you can ask a hobby detectorist to look at. Half an hour, a patch with edges, nobody's permission to arrange, and a good chance the thing is genuinely there.
Retrievly is where you post that. You describe roughly where it happened, and people nearby with detectors can offer to come and look. We are new, so there may be nobody signed up near you yet — when that happens we go out and look for someone in your area rather than leaving your request sitting there.
This matters more here than on most pages, because the place you are describing is your home. A searcher sees a rough circle of about five kilometres, never your address. Only the person you choose is told where to come, and you arrange it with them directly.
Retrievly is free at the moment — no fee, no commission, nothing to cancel. No money goes through Retrievly either: if you want to thank whoever finds it, that is arranged between the two of you.
Being straight with you: Retrievly does not check or vet the people who offer, so read the profile and be at home while anyone searches. And a good chance is not a promise — plenty of searches find nothing, in a garden as anywhere else.
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Kenny built Retrievly. He has snorkelled the Danube for years and keeps bringing up things that belong to other people: wallets with the ID still in them, phones, keys. That is where Retrievly came from.
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