In article ,
Anonymo421 wrote:

Caster bean oil is toxic to moles and grub and the like.

I use it on my lawn to kill the moles and stop there digging up my nice
3 acre lawn.

Works great.

Any idea if it does horrible things to earthworms?

Theoretically, it should kill them. The poison in ricin is
a ribosomal poison. Ribosomes are small structures in
the cell that are involved in making proteins in the cell
from the patterns encoded in DNA. If the cell cannot
make the proteins necessary to maintain itself, it falls
apart. The poison acts as a catalyst; after breaking
up one ribosome, it moves to the next. A single ricin
molecule can inactivate over 1500 ribosomes per minute,
and is resistent to degradation.

Thus, a very small dose can be fatal.

See:

http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/plants/...cin/ricin.html


billo