Tick Tree-foil Traditional Cache

Tick-Treefoils have many species. This is Pointed-Leaved Tick-Treefoil. Both the flower and the trail are new to me. Park at GC6MN00 ; Saint John's Wort.

Desmodium is a genus in the flowering plant family Fabaceae, sometimes called tick-trefoil, tick clover, hitch hikers or beggar lice. There are dozens of species and the delimitation of the genus has shifted much over time.

These are mostly inconspicuous legumes; few have bright or large flowers. Though some can become sizeable plants, most are herbs or small shrubs. Their fruit are loments, meaning each seed is dispersed individually enclosed in its segment. This makes them tenacious plants and some species are considered weeds in places. They have a variety of uses, as well.

Several Desmodium species contain potent secondary metabolites. They are used aggressively in agriculture in push-pull technology. Tick-trefoils produce high amounts of antixenotic allomones - chemicals which repel many insect pests - and allelopathic compounds which kill weeds. For example, D. intortum and D. uncinatum are employed as groundcover in maize and sorghum fields to repel Chilo partellus, a stem-boring grass moth. They also suppress witchweeds such as Asiatic witchweed (Striga asiatica) and  purple witchweed(S. hermonthica).^[1]

Tick-trefoils are generally useful as living mulch and as green manure, as they are able to improve soil fertility via nitrogen fixation. Most also make good animal fodder.

Some Desmodium species have been shown to contain high amounts of tryptamine alkaloids, though many tryptamine-containing Desmodium species have been transferred to other genera.

Pointed-Leaved Tick Trefoil,  Desmodium glutinosum

The inflorescence of Pointed-Leaved Tick Trefoil is produced above its pseudo-whorl of leaves; they both derive from the same central stem. Other Desmodium spp. (Tick Trefoils) produce their leaves alternately along their stems, instead of being bunched together in a pseudo-whorl.

The cache is a camoed, "micro" pill bottle. The kind you have to push hard, both to open and close. It has only a rolled log, a rubber band and a tiny plastic bag. Please keep track of it all, so you can put it together easily, once you have logged. BYOP and no tweezers, please, they kill the plastic.