The staff in our front office have been counting down the days until the official beginning of spring.
When I step outside and get blasted with a 40 km/h wind with the thermometer hovering around -20 C it’s difficult to be optimist, but we all know spring will eventually arrive.
And with the arrival of spring comes another growing season for those of us who like to putter in our yards. Several weeks ago Steve Rawlyk of North Battleford dropped off a photo of his castor beans grown in 2014. He says some of the plants were nine and a half feet tall.
I enjoy growing castor beans, too, although I’ve never had any grow as big as those photographed by Rawlyk. I first read about them in a Lois Hole’s Bedding Plant Favourites.
The plants are easily grown from seed, although I prefer to give them a head start in my front room greenhouse. I had some difficulty the past few years with the two huge cotyledons that emerge when the bean seed bursts open damping off almost as soon as they emerged from the soil. A greenhouse owner advised that the problem is probably commercial soil mixtures, so I started germinating them with soil on the bottom of the pot and then covering them with vermiculite. That seemed to do the trick.
Rawlyk’s plants are growing right in a flowerbed and castor beans will grow to fill whatever size area you plant them in. According to a Better Homes and Gardens article they can grow up to 20 feet high.
Some shun the plant because the seeds are extremely toxic. I’ve never worried too much about that, because it is a tropical plant and although it’s distinctive knobby blossoms do appear, a prairie growing season isn’t long enough for the seeds to mature.
My research produced some alarming information, however. A Cornell University site recommends not letting the plants flower or form seeds and says one seed can kill a child.
It’s probably their toxic nature that has Rawlyk observing that the plants repell insects and small animals.
Cornell University also adds this little tidbit to their information: In 1978, ricin (the poisonous ingredient in the seeds) was used to assassinate Georgi Markov in 1978, a Bulgarian journalist who spoke out against the Bulgarian government. He was stabbed with the point of an umbrella while waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Station in London. They found a perforated metallic pellet embedded in his leg that had presumably contained the ricin toxin.
So, enjoy the amazing power of the castor bean to fill up whatever space you provide for it, but don’t plan to make any baked beans from what they produce.
