NYC Rooftop Gardner big photo

NYC Rooftop Gardner big photo
September, 2013

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Castor Bean Plant

Castor-Bean-Collage-193kb

2 comments:

  1. That's very interesting Nancy! And it's a beautiful looking plant.

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  2. NOTE: My sister is a botanist at UCSB and tells me that the Castor Bean plant contains a toxin called Ricin that can be made into poison and that I should re-consider growing it. Ricin comes from the by-product of making castor oil. I don't know how castor oil is extracted and I surely can't grow enough beans to do it myself. But I searched online and discovered that ricin is found in the mashed hulls of the castor bean pods, and also in the castor beans themselves if they are chewed or ground up. So a dog eating a bean pod could be poisoned if it chewed the beans and ate enough of them. The CDC does not have any reported cases in the US of deaths related to ricin. Some crazy people have made ricin poisoned letters and sent them to political leaders, but they were intercepted and it is not determined that there was enough poison to actually kill someone. For this reason, I have decided to continue growing this plant, since it still has healing value to me.

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