Chicory Traditional Cache

Chicory is blooming early here this year. I think of them more common in August, together with Golden Rods. They'll make a beautiful light blue border on many of our roads. This is a Park and Grab.

Common chicory, Cichorium intybus, is a somewhat woody, perennial herbaceous plant of the dandelion family, usually with bright blue flowers, rarely white or pink. Many varieties are cultivated for salad leaves, chicons (blanched buds), or roots (var. sativum), which are baked, ground, and used as a coffee substitute and additive. It is also grown as a forage crop for livestock. It lives as a wild plant on roadsides in its native Europe, and now common in North America, China, and Australia, where it has become widely naturalized. It flowers from July until October.

"Chicory" is also the common name in the United States for curly endive (Cichorium endivia); these two closely related species are often confused.

Chicory may be cultivated for its leaves, usually eaten raw as salad leaves. Cultivated chicory is generally divided into three types, of which there are many varieties:^[16]

• Radicchio usually has variegated red or red and green leaves.

• Sugarloaf looks rather like cos lettuce, with tightly packed leaves

• Belgian endive, known in Dutch as witloof or witlof ("white leaf"), endive or (very rarely) witloof in the United States, indivia in Italy, endivias in Spain, chicory in the UK, as witlof in Australia, endive in France, and chicon in parts of northern France and in Wallonia. It has a small head of cream-coloured, bitter leaves. It is grown completely underground or indoors in the absence of sunlight in order to prevent the leaves from turning green and opening up (etiolation). 

Root chicory (Cichorium intybus var. sativum) has been cultivated in Europe as a coffee substitute. The roots are baked, roasted, ground, and used as an additive, especially in the Mediterranean region. As a coffee additive, it is also mixed in Indian filter coffee, and in parts of Southeast Asia, South Africa, and southern United States, particularly in New Orleans. It has been more widely used during economic crises such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and during World War II in Continental Europe. Chicory, with sugar beet and rye, was used as an ingredient of the East German Mischkaffee (mixed coffee), introduced during the "East German coffee crisis" of 1976-79.

Some beer brewers use roasted chicory to add flavor to stouts (commonly expected to have a coffee-like flavour). Others have added it to strong blond Belgian-style ales, to augment the hops, making a witlofbier, from the Dutch name for the plant.

Chicory is well known for its toxicity to internal parasites. Studies indicate that ingestion of chicory by farm animals results in reduction of worm burdens.

In Napoleonic Era France, chicory frequently appeared as either an adulterant in coffee, or as a coffee substitute.^[58] Chicory was also adopted as a coffee substitute by Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War, and has become common in the United States. It was also used in the United Kingdom during the Second World War, where Camp Coffee, a coffee and chicory essence, has been on sale since 1885.

The cache is tied in. It is a camoed "micro" pill bottle, the Push Hard to Open and Close kind. It has only a rolled log, with a precious rubber band to keep it tight, so it will fit in the tiny plastic bag and the bottle. Please put the rubber band on your finger while you log, so you don't loose it. Please BYOP and no tweezers, as they kill the plastic.