The place I bought them from call them seedling pots. I’ve also seen them called nursery pots or nursery bags. I will give a link to them at the end but I will first give you my assessment for the pros and cons.
Advantages:
1. Cheap: about $0.10 a bag not counting shipping
2. Easy to move around or transplant into a bigger bag later. This past season, I would start about 15 seedlings in a 3-gallon grow bag and leave them in that container for about 2-3 months and then move them to their own 1-gallon bag. It would usually take at least 2 hours to get the whole root ball out of the bag, separate the roots, and put each one into their own bag. More importantly, some species did not like the disruption and did not make it. This avoids most if not all of the transplant shock when you move them to a bigger container. I now put about 10 of these seedling bags in a 3-galllon grow bag. If one seedling is behind the others and getting shaded out, I can pull it out and position it elsewhere in the bag or move it to a totally different bag.
3. Good root development. The roots easily grow through this material and then get air pruned. I will occasionally pull them out of the larger 3-gallon bag and scrape off or pull off the roots that have grown through.
Disadvantage:
1. The main drawback is that the size they come in is not very optimal. The place advertises them as 8 x 10 inches. The height is actually about 9.75 inches and the width is around 7.375 inches from seam to seam. That is too wide for purpose of starting a new tree (in my opinion) so I mark the width down to about 4.375 inches and have a new seam sewed. I then cut away the excess with scissors. It would be nice if you could split the difference and get two bags but they’re just not wide enough if you try to do it that way.
2. A little bit hard and time consuming to fill the bags with potting medium. For me, it takes about 5 minutes to fill each bag. You have to pack the soil in pretty tightly or else the soil level will gradually sag down an inch or two as you water it. If you pack down too hard you may hear a seam start to rip. However, I haven’t had a seam rip enough so that it could not be used.
3. A little bit hard to add water. For the initial watering (right after I add potting medium) I put about 10 or so of the seedling bag in a bucket with just enough water so that the top is not submerged. I will then pour a little bit of water into each bag to top them off. For ongoing watering, some of the water may leak out the sides toward the top so it can be a slight issue for the water to get all the way to the bottom of the bag.
Here is the link: https://www.247garden.com/specialty-pots/seedling-pots.html
I have been using the 8x10 size but I just ordered the 12x12 size since I’ll be able to turn each bag into two, once I mark off the desired width and have a new seam sewn. I will also trim down the height down to about 9.75 inches to be consistent with what I already have.
I contacted the the company and asked them if they could try to have their supplier make a more optimally sized bag but they were not interested. I have looked on ebay and most other places (alibaba & allied express) to try to find better sized bags but no real luck. It's actually kind of a pain to search because most places list the sizes in cm rather than inches. I actually contacted a place in China about getting custom sized bags but never got a reply. If anyone has a good lead on getting customized sizes then please post a reply.
All in all, I like them. I would recommend trying them as long as either you can sew them down to the desired width or have a wife, girl-friend, or mom that can do it for you.
Last edited:
