Can I find meteorites in my garden?
It's possible but very unlikely. Meteorites have occasionally landed in gardens, but most garden 'meteorites' turn out to be slag, clinker or ordinary rocks. Tiny micrometeorites are a more realistic target.
Meteorites have certainly landed in gardens. In 1991 a small stone fell into a garden in Glatton, Cambridgeshire, and in 2021 the Winchcombe meteorite landed on a family's driveway in Gloucestershire. But any one garden is a minuscule target, and the chance that a meteorite has landed in yours, and stayed there to be found, is extremely small.
What gardens do contain, especially in older towns and on former industrial land, is plenty of meteorwrongs. Clinker and slag left over from coal fires, furnaces and iron-working are dark, often bubbly or glassy, and sometimes magnetic, which fools many people. So do lumps of rusty iron, iron-rich nodules, basalt, and brick fragments. A genuine stony meteorite is usually heavy for its size, has a thin black or brown crust if fresh, does not have gas bubbles throughout, and often attracts a magnet. If a rock is full of holes like a sponge, it is almost certainly not a meteorite.
A more promising project is hunting for micrometeorites, particles smaller than about 2 mm that fall everywhere, all the time. In the mid-2010s, researchers showed that genuine micrometeorites can be found in sediment from city roof gutters. Collecting dust and sorting it with a magnet is easy; proving that a tiny sphere is from space and not from industry needs a good microscope and expert knowledge, but it is a fascinating challenge.
If children join in, an adult should handle anything involving ladders or roofs, and young hunters should not taste, cut, heat or use acid on rocks. If you think you have found a real meteorite, contact a museum or university geology department.