Castor plants

[bamboothew]

I really enjoyed reading this old thread! What a beautiful and interesting plant! What prompted my reading it was that I have decided to plant some of these plants this spring. Got some very cheap seeds from ebay, supposedly harvested from this past fall so hopefully there will be good seed viability. I am wondering if anyone knows how long the seeds stay viable? There are many more than I could possibly need and I wonder if some could be saved for next year just in case for some reason I don't get any to flower this year, though I doubt that will be an issue.

Btw since I am such a huge believer in controlled carbohydrate nutrition I was thinking the leaves would make good salad greens and the seeds could be ground into a delicious nut butter, no?

Perhaps that joke needs a disclaimer...

[ghmerrill]

I'm not eating at your house!

We have a huge gopher problem here, and the one year I planted castor, it did keep gophers away from those plants.

[foxd]

Definitely not eating there either!

What variety of Castor Bean did you get? You could have saved the expense and asked here for some seeds.

[bamboothew]

Foxd, thanks, it didn't even occur to me to ask for the seeds. In fact, I had quickly bought the seeds on ebay before I even thought to search this site for a thread on the subject, had no idea it is so commonly grown. There was no variety name listed but there is supposedly a purplish cast to the leaves, anyway it isn't a dwarf type or anything so it will do what I need it to. I figure that for $3 or 50 seeds, shipping included, and I should likely have castor bean plants forever due to reseeding. Not too bad

[Iowaboo]

The ones I grew last year, were from seed a few years old. Started picking the seeds out of the pods and left it in a shed, and the first 75 seeds magically disappeared, guess mice like them.

[bamboothew]

I actually saw a website that suggests using them as rat poison, I think it said to put a bit of peanut butter on them to encourage mice/rats to eat them. Apparently no encouragment needed, though