Magic Sproutz For Green Thumb Sunday!

I have written several times before about The Spinmaster Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes plants. We have just grown two more of them and our new fortunes are "Adventures Await", and "Long Live".

The symbols on the other side are a sun and a horseshoe. If those secret fortunes are referring to the garden this year, I like them! Adventures, long life, luck and plenty of sunshine - sounds like a winner!

My family enjoys these Secret Fortunes plants but I would like to find some of the new Disney Magic Bean Message Plants. Has anyone seen these?

They appear to be just like the Secret Fortunes Plants, but the cans have Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh on them. You also get to pick the message ahead of time. Messages are things like, "I Love You", "Thank You" and "Happy Birthday" so you can give them as gifts.

I have not seen them in person. Robin commented on one of my Magic Sproutz posts about them. She found a website in Hong Kong called Sun's Collection selling them. That's where I got the above pictures. Does anyone know if these are available in the United States?

These Spin Master Magic Sproutz products sure are mysterious. They are very hard to find in stores, and there is not a lot of information online. That is why I keep bringing them up. People are contacting me with questions about them, but I don't really know much. All I know is that my daughters gave me one last year as a gift and we really liked it. We then found them again later for $1.00 each at Walmart in the discount toy bin.

These really are neat little novelty plants. As far as I could find out, the plant is called Jack Bean or Sword Bean, which is also called the Chickasaw Lima bean, Brazilian broad bean and other names. These are cool, but why are they hard to find?

Here's the beef with these products as I see it; They are marketed as toys! Spinmaster Company, if you are reading this, please understand that you are missing a huge market by not showing these to us gardeners! We are the ones that can appreciate them. Our kids are the ones who would want these, not regular kids that happen to see them at Wal-Mart or Dollar General while they are looking for their favorite action figure. You need to put them on the shelf next to potting soils and seed trays at all the box stores where we spend insane amounts of money this time of year because we just can't wait to get our hands dirty and plant something!

These Magic Sproutz products, especially the Disney Magic Beans, need to be put right next to the Jiffy Kid seed cups. Have you seen those? My kids just had to get one of each kind:

These Jiffy cups are just a peat pot with a soil disc and a seed! Not near as cool as the Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes. They need to be more readily available. Sorry about the rant. Do you agree with me?

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More Secret Fortunes in my Future!

We found some more Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes!

These are such great little novelties that my daughters originally picked up for me a while ago. We grew one and it worked! Our secret fortune was "Money, Money, Money!" If you haven't been following along, I wrote all about it onJanuary 26 and February 1st. If you don't want to go back and read those posts, in a nutshell this is what our first plant looked like:

And here is what the fortune printed on the seed pod looked like:

My family is excited now because we just found them again at Wal-Mart. They were originally $4.86 each but were marked down to $1.00 each! We bought three of them and plan on growing them right away!

Hey, anything to keep the winter blues away, right! Especially since the outdoor gardening season keeps looking farther and farther away. We have had more snow and ice all week and they're calling for a couple more inches of snow tomorrow!

I'm beginning to think that Puxatony Phil is crazy! Who can trust an old groundhog anyway! :)

More on Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes

There have been several people interested in further discussing the Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes plant that I wrote about in last week's post. I have gotten email and comments asking where they can be bought and what kind of bean it is. The problem seems to be that they are not available in stores right now. Mine was bought in the summer at Dollar General for just a couple dollars. The website listed on the can is www.spinmaster.com which is the company that brings us Shrinky Dinks, Moonsand and other toy novelties. When I went to their website however, I could find no mention of Magic Sproutz or Secret Fortunes. Could it be that they don't sell them any more? Maybe most people were too suspicious to buy them. Or maybe they view it as a seasonal item and will sell them again in the spring.

If anyone has seen them in any stores, please comment here so others will know where to look. If you just have to get one and don't want to wait, Amazon has them for $6.95 plus shipping which is a bit more than we paid this summer. While I was looking for them on Amazon, I came across some other message bean plants as well. Here are the four different ones I found:

Any of these would probably work. Or you could be like me and try to make and grow one yourself. For that we need to look in to the second question, "What kind of bean plant is the Magic Sproutz?" I found that to be a topic in The Gardener's Forum that began last spring. It went on all summer and nobody had an answer until this January 3rd where someone said she thought it was the jack bean or the sword bean, also called "Chickasaw lima bean, Brazilian broad bean, coffee bean, ensiform bean, horse bean, mole bean, go-ta-ki, overlook bean, Pearson bean, watanka, and raba de burro." She then describes it in great length. You can read it yourself. Just scroll all the way to the bottom.

I don't know if she is right, but its the best answer I've heard so far. I'm going to look for some of those seeds! Then I just have to figure out how to stamp a message on them. Something to think about since the garden outside is frozen and they are predicting 2 inches of snow tonight! Happy February, right?

Secret Fortune: Money Money Money!!!

My secret fortune has been revealed, and I like the sound of it - $ Money, Money, Money! What am I talking about? My kids bought their dear old gardening dad a little present. It was a small aluminum can called "Magic Sproutz Secret Fortunes".

I think they bought it at the Dollar General store. All you're supposed to do is pop the lid, add water and wait for a plant to grow and reveal your secret message! We didn't really believe anything would happen and nothing did for over a week. Then all of a sudden a large sprout pushed its way up and out and grew in to some kind of large bean plant!

The secret fortune was revealed even before the plant grew leaves however. As soon as the plant sprouted, it pushed up what was the largest seed I think I've ever seen which revealed the fortune in writing!

Each side was different. Money Money Money on one side and a dollar sign on the other. Here is a picture with me holding a quarter up to it for size reference.

This was a fun little novelty which I recommend if you can find one. It would be great for you gardeners who are itching to watch something grow. I wonder if there are different fortunes written on different ones. I just hope your secret fortune is as good as mine!