Growing Media
Growing Media
Grow Bags
Filled or empty, open-top or slab. The container that decoupled your crop from your soil — and from everything living in it.
Overview
Growing without the soil problem
Soil-borne disease does not respond to better management. Once nematodes, fusarium or bacterial wilt are established in a polyhouse floor, you are managing decline rather than production. Rotation is not available inside a structure you built for one crop.
Grow bags sidestep the problem entirely. The crop grows in a defined volume of clean media that you control and replace, sitting above the contaminated soil rather than in it. It is the reason bag culture displaced in-ground production across most of Indian protected cultivation for tomato, capsicum and cucumber.
The secondary benefit is precision. A defined media volume means the root zone is a known quantity — you dose feed and water against a volume you can calculate rather than an unbounded soil profile that buffers, fixes and leaches unpredictably. This is what makes fertigation worth doing.
We supply pre-filled bags in buffered low-EC cocopeat and blends, and empty UV-stabilised bags for growers filling from their own blocks. Both in open-top and slab formats. Which you choose comes down to labour, freight economics and how much control you want over the blend.
Features
Built for bag culture
Soil disease bypass
The crop never touches contaminated soil. This is the whole reason bag culture exists.
Defined root volume
A known media volume makes fertigation calculable rather than approximate.
UV-stabilised film
Bags sit under cover in full light for a full season. The UV package is not optional.
Drainage engineered
Correct slit placement and count — the most common thing growers get wrong on site.
Filled or empty
Pre-filled for labour economy, empty for blend control and freight economy.
Open-top or slab
Open-top for larger plants and longer crops; slab for high-density short cycles.
Specifications
Formats and fill
Format is driven by crop and density. Fill choice is driven by whether you would rather buy labour or buy freight.
| Format | Fill Options | Typical Crops | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open-top bag | Cocopeat / blend / empty | Tomato, capsicum, brinjal | Larger root volume, longer crops |
| Open-top bag | Cocopeat / blend / empty | Cucumber, melon | Vigorous crops, higher water demand |
| Slab | Cocopeat / blend | High-density tomato, cucumber | Compact footprint, shorter cycles |
| Empty bag | Supplied unfilled | Any — grower fills from blocks | Freight economy, blend control |
Bag dimensions, fill volume and drainage slit configuration vary by crop, density and irrigation strategy. There is no universal grow bag — a bag sized for a six-month tomato crop is wrong for a short cucumber cycle. Send crop, planting density and irrigation method and we will specify format, volume and drainage.
Material & fill
- UV-stabilised HDPE / woven PP
- Buffered low-EC cocopeat fill
- Perlite and vermiculite blends available
- Batch EC and pH data with filled bags
Supply & support
- Filled or empty, your choice
- Drainage configuration specified per crop
- Palletised for structure delivery
- Matched drip and fertigation components
Applications
Where bag culture runs
Protected cultivation where the soil is a liability rather than an asset.
Advantages
Why growers moved to bags
Bag culture is more expensive per square metre than growing in the ground. It won anyway, because the alternative was watching yields decline year over year inside an expensive structure.
- Soil disease taken off the table. Nematodes, fusarium and wilt in the floor stop being your problem.
- Fertigation becomes precise. A known root volume means you can calculate dosing instead of estimating it.
- Media replaced between crops. Reset to clean media each cycle rather than trying to sterilise a floor.
- Poor sites become viable. Saline, rocky or contaminated ground stops mattering when the crop is not in it.
- Higher density possible. Bag layout is a design decision rather than a constraint of the existing soil profile.
- Rooftop and urban production. No soil requirement at all — the entire premise of terrace farming.
Gallery
Under cover
Industries
Sectors we supply
FAQ
Common questions
It is a trade between labour and freight. Filled bags arrive ready to plant — no hydration station, no filling crew, no wet handling in your structure. But you are paying to ship expanded media, which is mostly air and water by volume. Empty bags plus compressed blocks ship far more efficiently and let you control the blend precisely, at the cost of doing the work on site. Large operations with labour available usually fill their own. Smaller units and anyone short on labour in the planting window usually buy filled.
Most bag culture systems replace media each crop cycle, and that is generally the right call — the reason you moved to bags was to avoid accumulating disease, and reusing media reintroduces exactly that risk. Some growers get a second cycle from a bag with sterilisation between crops, but the saving is small against the downside if it goes wrong. If you are considering reuse, be honest about whether you can actually sterilise reliably.
Enough to prevent perched water at the base, positioned so the media does not stay saturated at the bottom of the profile. The count and placement depend on bag volume, crop water demand and irrigation frequency. This is the single most common thing growers get wrong on site — too few slits and the base goes anaerobic and the roots die from the bottom up, which looks like a nutrient problem and gets treated as one for weeks. We specify drainage with the bag rather than leaving it to be cut on site.
You can, but think about it first. Bags outdoors are exposed to full sun on the container itself, which drives root zone temperature up sharply — a bag is not insulated the way soil is. They also dry out much faster than in-ground plants and are vulnerable to wind displacement. Bag culture is designed for protected environments where the structure moderates the extremes. Outdoors, the media volume usually needs to increase and irrigation frequency rises considerably.
It depends on crop duration and planting density, not on the crop name. A long-season indeterminate tomato held eight months needs substantially more root volume than a short determinate cycle. Density matters too — tighter spacing means more competition for the same volume. Send crop duration, variety type and your planned density, and we will specify volume rather than defaulting to whatever is on the shelf.
Enquiry
Request a
specification.
Send the crop, the cycle length and your planting density. You will get format, volume, fill and drainage specified — with a view on whether filled or empty suits your operation.
Related
Specified alongside
Products that typically ship in the same order.
Growing Media
Field Systems
Structures
Propagation