I live in SF and have a backyard that is mostly full of succulents, but up popped this visitor from the middle of one of my massive Aloe plants and it grew fast. It hit about 12' in about two years, and then grew all these seed pods, and that's when I looked up the exact plant and found out that it was a Castor Bean plant, and saw all the warnings about ricin and the incredible poisonous nature.
So I tried my best to remove it - it was growing through the arms of my spiny aloe plant, so I carefully would cut off a branch, try to bring it over to the clear area in my yard, and then try to chop it up into smaller pieces to put it into the compost, hoping to catch all the seed pods.
I know that I can't have done it perfectly, and some of the seed pods fell amongst all the succulents and aloe in my yard.
I'm not as worried about the regrowth, because I know what it looks like and can quickly pull any new plants.
But I am worried about the possibility of poisonous seeds littering the yard, we have a dog that used to use our back yard on a daily basis, and now I'm not letting him go back there at all. I don't expect he would eat a seed pod on the ground, but if he *did* for some reason, it sounds like it would likely be fatal.
I can't really find/remove them without ripping out the entirety of my back yard, since I'm sure they've fallen amongst all the other plants and it's a succulent jungle back there.
So the question is this. How long are those seed pods going to be sitting on the ground with deadly poison in them, able to be eaten by a goofy dog with bad luck? Is my back yard permanently a danger zone, or is this something I just need to give a few weeks to, assuming the pods will dry out and decay and eventually not be interesting to an animal to eat.
I don't really know who I could even find the answer for that from, I kind of need someone who is both an animal behavior specialist and a garden science genius..
Any thoughts?
