Texas Gardening: Castor Bean?, 1 by WUVIE

WUVIE wrote:
Hi SC and all,

My own experience, though I'm in Oklahoma and not Texas, is that
while they will come up and do gain from an early beginning, seems
they actually do just fine started outdoors. They do require a nice
long growing season for seed harvest, but can be grown quite well
as an annual regardless.

However, in all the years I've grown them, the general rule of thumb is
'the bigger the seed, the bigger the plant'. Please note, there are exceptions
I'm sure, I just haven't experienced them. :-) If I were to start any indoors,
it would be the larger seeds / larger varieties.

In our front yard we have two of the very largest plants we've ever grown.
No fancy soil, no fertilizers, no Miracle Grow, just plain old soil and water.
Deep waterings instead of occasional. Here we are a skip away from a
potential first frost and the seed pods are not even thinking about maturity.

We planted early this year, outdoors, and were seeing fabulous progress.
Suddenly, a cold snap hit out of the blue, and most were killed. We had to
start over, but lost several weeks of growing. Those weeks could have
come in handy now that we're waiting on seeds. What a shame! A case
of 'should have started indoors' for sure!

Loving all the photos, folks, thanks for sharing! :-)

Karen Marie