Foliar spray to promote hydroponic growth based on sea sense

Leyland Minter is well known around the laboratories of some of the largest chemical empires in the world but what is not so well known is Mr Minter’s left of centre formative years – and that may help explain his direction down the path of organic supplements.

His mother, raised at Killarney on the Eastern Darling Downs, was something of a hippy two decades before the so-called New Age. And she wasn't averse to holistic approaches to farming while tending her commercial flower beds.

That was in the 1950s when the family lived on rich red soil at Goonellabah, above Lismore, “Mum only ever wore sandals when she went to town,” recalled Mr Minter.

She would visit the 14 pubs in that city, sell them bunches of gladioli and offer to empty their ashtrays - collecting cigarette butts which she boiled with Lux flakes to create an effective insecticide. “She also collected seaweed off the beach at Ballina and trucked it home in the back of a 1952 Holden panel van, protected from the inevitable rust with mutton fat.

“When it was covered with dust it looked like Rommel coming out of the Western Desert,” recalled Mr Minter with glee.

Mr Minter's mother was a terrific influence on why her son chose agriculture as a career an initially in the organic direction until he was lured by the excitement of emerging organophosphates and the brand-new agro-chemical revolution.

With a degree in agriculture economics Mr Minter found a role as technical officer with Geigy, now Syngenta, and was the first industrial agronomist in Australia, and the first to study residual rates of decay in Atrazine.

While working with English company Fisons, Mr Minter was mentored by the chemist who was in charge of chemical warfare for Britain during World War Two and who was one of the earliest to work with organophosphates.

Mr Minter wrote the labels for, and trialled the likes of Tacktick and Rogur, di-methylate.

In his travels, working in South Africa, Kenya, India - where he trialled methaprines and pyrethroids in grain silos, he gleaned information about alkalis and their relationship with minerals and the prevention of fungus.

In later years he turned towards the organic market - founding Organic Crop Protectants and helping to create bio-oils based on canola that were designed to improve the wetting, spreading and sticking of most horticultural sprays.

These days he shares a simple barn shed with his wife Marilla, a practitioner of holistic medicine, and together they have created yet another common-sense product based on simple ideologies.

Always on the lookout for new products Mr Minter has developed an effective nutrient booster he calls ‘Seasol’  for hydroponic plants based on simple seawater - just what’s left after the water and the salt are taken away.

The chemistry sounds simple, and it is when one considers the path Mr Minter took to get where he is today.

The product therefore is straightforward, though in another product Mr Minter has added diatomaceous earth (the finely-milled silica-dioxide bodies of tiny living deep sea creatures) to act like cutting glass fragments in the mix.

The result here is annoyance in the joints grasshoppers and agony in the guts of loopers and other leaf munchers.

The mineral is also hydroscopic in nature which means that by ingesting it on the leaf bugs become desiccated, affecting scale, mealy bugs and whitefly.

The product is more blue than green but its has found favour with hydroponic lettuce growers in western sydney, passionfruit growers and a sweet corn in the Lochyer Valley who use the concoction as a once-a-week foliar spray and comment on the fact that plants reflect a vitality in their sheen.

There are advantages with using seawater nutrients as they don’t freeze  at the same temperature as fresh water, helping plants to develop some frost tolerance to minus 3 degrees.

And the silica component strengthens cell walls while the potassium and silica combine to give lettuce that marketable crunch.

“The hydroponic guys says they don’t have to buy fungicide when they use the product,” Mr Minter says. “That’s because seawater contains the whole periodic table. The brix levels in fruit grown with this additive are always high,” says Mr Minter.

In addition he says the modest load of heavy metals in concentrated seawater makes a good fungicide - much like the old fashioned health tonic  ‘silver water’.

Being a lateral thinker with aspirations of mysticism, Mr Minter also professes that the product helps to capture ‘aerial’ nutrients – like the nitrogen-flooded atmosphere during an electrical storm – something predicted by Einstein when he studied the superconductivity of monatomic minerals in the platinum group.

“Kelp only gets its nutrition from the sea,” points out Mr Minter, explaining his rationale. “With magnesium, calcium potassium, boron, silica, strontium, zinc, copper and iron making up the lengthy list of ingredients.

“The balance is just right for plants,” he says. “And humans.”