Castor can be seen everywhere in the countryside, and for castor, people in the past may recognize it, however, people nowadays seldom know about it, and even don't know how to read these two words. It is really time unforgiving.

The first thing to know is what is castor?

Ricinus communis is relatively common in rural areas and is a species of plant in the Euphorbiaceae family, belonging to annual or perennial herbs.

In various regions of China are cultivated, of which in North China, Northeast China planted the largest number of cultivation, Northwest and East China, followed by , the other are sporadic distribution of planting, the whole plant surface are presented as smooth.

Often seen in green, greenish gray and purplish red, its stems are rounded and hollow, while its leaves are alternate and larger, palmate and divided, panicles opposite the leaves and terminal, about 10-30cm long and perhaps longer than that.

It has male flowers in the lower part with yellowish styles, and female capsules with or without spines in the upper part with reddish styles, and its seeds are oval, with a hard, glossy seed coat with black, white and brown markings.

While castor is extremely fond of surviving in hot conditions, it is not frost-resistant, but is quite adaptable to acidity and alkalinity.

Now castor is not very popular, but in the past, castor is very popular, people rely on castor to replenish the oil in the stomach. Due to the previous shortage of supplies, the average household can only be divided into one or two pounds of oil per year, so the oil is too rare for people, may only be used on New Year's holidays to fry, this time castor will play a role, because the castor seeds contain oil.

Why is castor everywhere in the countryside?

As early as the last century, many villages heeded the call, the collective planting of a lot of castor, and in the barren saline land, crops are even difficult to grow, castor but grow strong, which can be seen, castor is a highly adaptable plant.

In that era of scarcity, the land is the life of the farmers, only have a harvest, there is hope to live, in that case, then why plant castor?

At that time, it was said to be very important industrial oil, in some areas of aviation and its needs, rural people heard, they responded positively, planting castor beans, and then sell the castor beans for money, then there were even packets of people responsible for technical guidance, said a lot of benefits of planting castor beans.

And one of them, which we may have even seen when we were children, is to make hemp rope. The castor skins produced by growing castor beans have a mainly fibrous material composition. So, many people throw away the castor rods after picking and peel off the hemp skins thus rolling them into hemp ropes. That is, we have seen the older generation sitting on stools and rubbing hemp ropes on their legs.

But now in the countryside has been uncommon

Because castor beans contain ricin and ricin, especially the former, which can cause people to be poisoned, 4-7 years old children taking castor beans 2-7 can cause poisoning or even death, and adults 20 can be fatal, castor beans produced in Africa just 2 can lead to the death of adults, small children only need a grain.

Plus, our country has long been over that era, in order to be safe, so the castor beans that can be seen everywhere in the countryside in the early days, in fact, now there are not much.