Yes the ornamentals look great small and shrubby. I have always wanted to make just one garden bed full of ornamentals in my driveway but because I only live on a normal suburban block my business plants always take over. I would love to have a black and purple chilli plant garden!
I have a cluster of Ebony Fire plants in a patch of the garden that are a nice black/purple with purple flowers. I'm trying to get one to regrow from the cotyledon nodes in a pot to produce two branches to twist and fuse too. I need though to try a bit of a larger experiment with how seedlings respond to losing their first true leaves.
Yes I am very particular with isolating and think if something isn't done right or not sure I would rather throw it out and loose money than disappoint a customer. I have also had it happen to me quite a few times in the past and it drives me crazy. You spend all that time, effort and money into growing it (and in my case isolating it) and then it fruits and is something different!
I also found non-authentic plants are an obstruction to my goal of finding hardy varieties with a decent flavour that grow well in my local conditions. I can imagine the wasted opportunity of isolating non-authentic plants when you could have been growing something else would drive you up the wall too.
I use a material that is insect and pollen proof and make cages out of them. It has taken many years and lots of money to try and perfect them and get the right design.
Is there a particular product code we can search for to find the same material. I imagine the expression on the faces of staff in a bridal store on their tulle netting supplies being raised by chilli growers. There would of course have to be another supplier of the specific netting you use.
There are way too many people out there just growing in their garden and thinking that just because a plant is 5metres away that it won't cross pollinate and then they sell the seeds on (usually ebay) for a quick buck and by the time you have grown them out you can't find the supplier anymore. Of course nothing is 100% secure/proof ( I may walk into my cage and a bee is on my back that I haven't seen) you never know nothing can be completely safe but I like to think that mine is 99.999% safe
Here are some pics from this season of some of my cages. All the plants in these are for seed selling.
New cage - the biggest I have. Will be eventually used for my BATO hydro systems with a screen in the middle to seperate the cage into two.
Those are some nice boxes.
Do they make good kites in gale force winds? ;-) How deep do you anchor the supporting rods?