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Caches In Shrubs?


Thot

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One situation that intimidates me is when I suspect the cache is hidden in shrubbery. Maybe three times now I’ve run into micro caches such that the nearest area to the coordinates where anything could be hidden was a flower bed with shrubs.

 

Last week I was looking for a micro (it used the official micro container). I know the coordinates were way off because they put me in the middle of a highway and when I got home and read the logs others had said the same thing. The nearest possible location was a flowerbed in a small park. The flower bed had a cluster of many small shrubs. I’m not a plant person, but the shrubs were like 20 inche hemispheres sitting on the ground. The bed was about 10 feet on a side. In order to examine the plants one would have to walk all over the flowerbed tramping down/compacting the mulch and soil. Also, the branches of the small bushes were more woody than soft, green and compliant. It seemed to me that digging into the plants and mashing them around to find anything in or under them had the potential to damage them. I was unwilling to do this. There was no one around when I was there, but at other times the area has a lot of traffic and I suspect you might get chastised for walking around in the flowerbed.

 

My question is, is it common for people hide caches in flowerbeds risking damage to the plants by the many geocachers that may come tramping around in the beds and mangling the plants?

 

I'm not making an ethical judgment here, I'm just trying to figure out how to proceed when I suspect the cache is hidden this way.

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What we do is search all around the plant beds then abandon if it is not found without trampling the plants. We then email the owner asking if it is in the flower bed and if it is we don't look for it. Shrubs are usually tougher so we search those but not the ornamental plant beds.

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Remember, if it is hard for you to get to, it was hard for the hider of the cache, too. In other words, if you are looking in a hard-to-get-to place in shrubs, chances are that the hider of the cache wouldn't have liked to be in there either.

 

BTW we have never found a cache in shrubs, but have gotten pretty beaten up looking.

Edited by Will+Bill
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Yes it's common. Here in Cacheville, it's fairly common to wire something into shrubs...

 

But NOT when you have to trample an ornamental bed to get them... Although I must add that perhaps the beds were re-landscaped after the cache was hidden?

 

I just put one in the bushes and they went around and re-mulched everything after I hid my cache, so now we have to trample mulch to get to the cache container. If there were flowers there, too, though, I'd move the cache.

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Remember, if it is hard for you to get to, it was hard for the hider of the cache, too. In other words, if you are looking in a hard-to-get-to place in shrubs, chances are that the hider of the cache wouldn't have liked to be in there either.

 

BTW we have never found a cache in shrubs, but have gotten pretty beaten up looking.

Ditto:

 

You can get pretty messed up looking. Then often when you turn on your brain and realize what Will+Bill said find it quickly.

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I looked for one in a flower bed. I dnf ed it. I found out later from another cacher it was under the roots of the shrubs!! Another cacher that I met there looked under the roots cause they were loose and saw nothing. We mentioned in the log that it looked like people had been pilling up plants and that maybe a new place should be found! They moved it to another area.:laughing:

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I wrote a similar forum contribution not long ago along the same vein; a cache hidden amongst some native shrubs along a well used trail in a National Forest. The area was trashed!

I got more criticism than agreement with many suggesting that there is plenty of forest for any and all activites, but I disagree.

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