Lisa you took the words out of my mouth.
With my new awful neighbors I was going to ask for extras.
A few months ago I read someone had lots and don't remember who.

Want to plant between the houses.
Tree

Tree, you might look at ornamental grasses as well....pampa type or others. I leave my grass up all winter. That would make for a longer screening time.

I couldn't find a (quick) good pic of it, but here is how mine looks in the spring. It gets taller when it it "blooms". I believe it is a "miscanthus".

I will check with my wife. I had some saved but she was afraid the great grand kids might get into them over the holidays and may have tossed them. She is gone now, and the seeds I dug up out of the garden a few minutes ago don't look so great. If no body jumps in here and offers seed, let me know, I feel sure I can find some. The plants do get large, I just pulled the last two stumps with my pickup.

Larry

Not all cultivars of Ricinus communis are large. There is a farm services store that sells the species plant seeds near me for about $2.50 for a scoop of maybe 20 seeds. If any want the seeds, let me know in a month or so when they'll have their seed stocks in . I'll buy/mail them to you & you can send a check for whatever the seeds are + the mailman's cut. If you don't pay me - I'll send Guido to visit you. ;-) They get BIG.size>

{{gwi:3277}}

Al

I planted some and the got big. Now I have them every year because the reseed a lot.

Al that sounds great.
Your plant is beautiful.

Lisa I'll look into pampas. I try growing it every year and something always kills it and haven't found the seeds this year.

Tree

Tree... I will see if I can dig up a slip of my miscanthus for you. I can't guarantee it :) I tried to dig it up last year to separate it and gave up. However it came to me as a "bonus" plant of three pieces of grass back when I was active on the plant trade board..so it must be possible! :-)

Lisa wow thanks but don't break your back for me.
Tree

Tree and Lisa - I have some castor beans I can share with you at the Fling! Remind me when I start the Fling Thread and we start making "trades". DH brought them home from Texas when he was working there a couple years back.

Paula

2013 castor bean plants

2012 August Castor Bean Plants

I've got some and am hoping to finally make it to the spring fling.

I have wanted to grow Castor plant forever but im so nervous with the dogs. Stringer nursery in Tulsa sells small plants every year for pretty cheap. The guy who works there told me he bags or cuts off the seed pods before they split open. I may try Rice Paper plant since they look pretty similar. I read that they do spread like mad underground though.

Mike

Tree, My Atwoods had two colors of Pampas Grass seeds yesterday, so you might try there if you have one close.

Thanks all.
Yes I have an Atwoods 8 miles from me.I just havn't been there in a couple of weeks. Last couple times I was there they didn't have there gardening stuff set up.
tree

Mike, it depends on your dogs. I have a small Maltese...under five pounds. Certainly wouldn't take her an entire seed to kill her. But...she is not the type to go around eating things she finds outside. I have no worries at all about that. I had castor bean plants the last two summers and she and her brother (he's no longer with us but that's not connected to castor beans) would spend a lot of time outside, largely unsupervised. Heck, even when I was out there I was busy doing other things and not paying any attention to them. I do not cut off all the seed pods before they burst open....I can't reach then all. Those plants get TALL. However, she is not interested in wolfing down a seed when there is so much else to occupy her, like squirrels, butterflies, a dragon fly, neighbor kids, etc. etc. (Neighbor kids are not allowed in my backyard and their parents know about my castor bean plants.)

If you have dogs that like to try everything, then you might want to add the castor bean to the list of plants you can't grow within reach of your dogs.

Mike, I have 5 large dogs and I do grow castor bean plants some years, but the dogs are only allowed in the fenced dog yard, and the castor bean plants are grown in a fenced garden area more than 100' from them. My dogs are chewers and will happily chew on pumpkins and winter squash, so I wouldn't trust them near anything known to be poisonous.

As far as I know, the cats (who don't chew on too many plants, though they love bean sprouts), who like to sleep in the shade of the castor bean plants, never have chewed on the plants. I makes me nervous to have the cats anywhere close to the castor bean plants when the plants are just sprouting though, so I usually put a wire cage over the young plants just in case the cats feel tempted to eat the wrong kind of bean sprout. I generally don't collect seeds....I just let them fall off the plants in the fall and the volunteers come up on their own in the spring.

I grow catmint, catnip and cat grass for the cats, so usually they focus on chewing those and leave the rest of the garden plants alone.

If I couldn't put the castor bean plants in a place where my dogs absolutely could not ever reach them, I wouldn't grow them. To me, it would be too risky because every dog is different and even good dogs that normally don't chew plants can have a day where they decide to chew up something new. It would be just too tragic if it was a castor bean plant that a dog decided to chew on.

Lisa, If my castor bean volunteers have sprouted before the Spring Fling (sometimes they sprout that early, sometimes they don't), I can dig up a few and pot them up and bring them to the fling.

Dawn

Thanks, Dawn! ...and OkieVegan and Moni, and Paula, and Tapla!

Tapla, thank you so much for your kind offer...it sounds like I should be able to trade here town...so no need for Guido :) Your plants really are huge!! My sis lives in mid-Michigan too.

On the poison issue...I don't have kids or dogs so I guess I'm safe ;) I will be careful about planting them on the fence line though...I do have dogs and kids in two other contiguous yards.

Last year Sharon and I went to help out a poster on this board...remember the weird yellow/brown cucumbers? We think she had castor beans planted at the end of her garden (she inherited the garden from the former owner). We warned her about it because she was going to have a baby. Wouldn't have been a problem last year, but if there were seeds still in the ground this summer it could be a problem. Hey, if you are out there...give us an update on your garden and the baby :)

Tree, I took this picture yesterday to show you the size of my ornamental grass. I'm getting ready to cut it back, hopefully today.

Lisa wow that looks so cool in the winter.
Thanks Tree

I've thought about trying to grow them for gopher control. Has anyone had any experience doing that?
Mine would be planted where the grandkids won't be playing and any dogs or cats that would happen upon them aren't supposed to be there anyway.

dream on. :) or try a gopher blaster...

okoutdrsmman - I have. About 3 or 4 years ago I planted seeds along the east and south sides of the garden area. No gopher appeared to have come in to the garden from those directions. They curbed around and came in from the west. Honestly, sometimes I wonder where the heck my brain was that day.

I'm going to plant them again this year in hopes of a good seed harvest. I've been told that if you drop a seed or two in the gophers tunnel - it helps persuade them to go somewhere else.

Moni - my front property looks like it's already experienced a gopher blast. Those rodents are certainly being busy. I'd run out of seeds if I put one in every mound right now.

Perhaps I need to start some of these under lights too.

Paula, I started mine under lights last year. It gave them a little more growing time and they got very large. The large plants sorta back-fired on me, all that I plant in my heavily amended soil blew down in the high wind. They were big and bushy and still did well, just looked a little strange. The ones I planted in lightly amended soil stayed straight.

Larry

I tried starting plants indoors to "get a jump on the season" several times, but I find putting 2 seeds in the ground per planting hole when soil temps hit 55* and culling the weaker of the 2 plants that sprout has always produced larger plants. The plants in the picture upthread are actually not the largest I've grown. The local newspaper took pictures of 2 plants that topped 15' and had leaves larger than 54" across. The ones in the pics upthread are about 10-11' with 48" leaves.

Al

I was wondering if a caster bean plant could be grown in a 25 Gal. pot? I have a window I want to shade but I don't want anything permanent.

Larry

Here's the thread with the ornamental grass pic!

Here's the thread with the ornamental grass pic!