How our grow bags are built
Most plants bought for a terrace die of watering. Not pests, not disease — someone goes away for a weekend, or waters anxiously every day until the roots rot, or the bag dries out in April and never recovers.
Every full-size bag we sell is built so that cannot happen. There is one instruction, and it is the only one that matters:
Water only through the olla opening. Nothing else.
The olla
An olla is an unglazed terracotta vessel buried in the soil with its neck above the surface. You fill it through that opening. Water then seeps through the porous clay wall at exactly the rate the surrounding soil pulls it — fast when the soil is dry, barely at all when it is wet.
The plant, in effect, drinks on demand. You cannot overwater it through the olla, because saturated soil stops drawing. You cannot underwater it while there is water in the olla, because dry soil keeps drawing. It is a two-thousand-year-old technique and nothing modern improves on it.
Top it up when it runs low. In a Bengaluru summer with a mature plant that is every two or three days; in the monsoon it can sit for a fortnight. Lift the lid and look — that is the whole of the maintenance.
Why it works from the day it arrives
The usual objection to ollas is that a young plant's roots sit near the surface, nowhere near the buried vessel, so it needs hand watering until they grow down.
That is true, and it is why we do the establishment ourselves. Your plant is grown in the bag it ships in, alongside the olla, for weeks or months before it reaches you. By the time you take delivery the roots have already found the olla. You never handle the stage where it would have mattered.
The hugelkultur base
Underneath the growing medium is a layer of well-rotted wood. As it breaks down it behaves like a sponge, holding water through a hot week and releasing nutrients slowly over years rather than in a flush.
The wood is deliberately part-decomposed before it goes in. Fresh wood draws nitrogen out of the soil as it rots, which is the classic first-year hugelkultur problem — hungry, yellowing plants in months two and three. Rotted wood does the opposite and feeds them.
Natural farming inputs
The growing medium is prepared and maintained on the principles of Subhash Palekar's natural farming and Korean Natural Farming. In practice that means the soil biology is the fertiliser: jeevamrutha for microbial activity, indigenous microorganisms cultured from the land the plants are grown on, fermented plant material, and mulch to keep the surface covered and the soil breathing.
No synthetic fertiliser and no chemical pesticide is used at any stage.
We describe this as natural farming rather than organic, deliberately. Organic is a certified term in India under NPOP and PGS-India, and we do not hold that certification. What we can tell you is the method, which is what this page is.
Keeping it going
The soil life is alive, so it needs feeding, not replacing. A monthly jeevamrutha drench through the olla keeps the microbial population working; without it, activity tails off over a season and the plant starts asking for conventional feeding.
Ask us and we will show you how to make it. It costs almost nothing and a single batch feeds every bag you own.
The one exception
Our leafy greens ship in 6 inch bags, which have no room to bury an olla. Those are hand watered, and their product pages say so. Everything full-size has the olla.