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How I invented Gold Leaf · Hydroponics Daily

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Hi, welcome back to Hydroponics Daily with me, Dr. Russell Sharp.
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As I say on every podcast, I'm the inventor of gold leaf, or as it's called in the UK, liquid gold.
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And today I thought I'd talk about how I invented gold leaf.
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And it all stems from a meeting I had with a company called Nutriculture,
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who are based near Preston in the UK.
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I don't think they exist anymore, but I was supplying them a range of biostimulants at the time,
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seaweed extracts, which I used to make an awful lot of still
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do and they one of their chemists
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in a meeting said could you make a one-part fertilizer with
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every essential nutrient in for beginner growers
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because beginners struggle with all the different fertilizers and
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the a's and the a's the b's the c's and the ph ups
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and the ph downs and i just repeated back to them what was
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common wisdom at the time which was no you can't do that
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because the nutrients interact and form insoluble precipitate
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in the bottle that means the they don't
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work if you look at miracle grow have
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a have a one part fertilizer and if you look at the reviews that
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they all say that there's calcium phosphate at the bottom and it's all precipitated
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out so for beginners one parts people try and make one parts and they always
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don't have good results so one parts have a bad name on the industry because
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there's lots of people selling products with insoluble calcium phosphate at
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the bottom so i went away and kept the idea.
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The problem in my head because i like to keep
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lots of end user grower problems in my
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head because i go by something called serendipitous innovation whereas
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i don't have a gantt chart full of projects and my company doesn't have a gantt
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chart full of projects that we need to say this product is going to be made
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now and we're going to come up with this invention now what we do is we think
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about the problems and then maybe one year two years ten years down the line
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an idea might we might think of an idea and we go, oh, that solved that problem.
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It might be a product, it might be a service, it might be anything,
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but that's what serendipitous innovation is.
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And I think it leads to a better form of innovation. And that's what happened with Goldleaf.
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Suddenly I was reading about certain chemicals and I thought that would be really
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good for that one part that nutriculture wanted.
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So I spent a good deal of time coming up with various iterations of a formulation
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based on what the nutrients were required for growing and using this technology
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and the first few just didn't work they fell out a solution they separated,
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and things like that things crashed out and then eventually we
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came up with a stable sorry i came up with a stable one and then it killed or
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killed all the plants because i was using sulfur in the form of a surfactant
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and that just destroyed all the plant roots so back to the drawing board get
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the sulfur in a different method and a chelated form and then came up with what
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i thought was the final version,
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tested on about 40 different crops and about 10% suffered from magnesium deficiency.
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Up the magnesium level in it and tried it again on those crops and it went really
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well so then i went back to nutriculture and said you know i've got this amazing
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product and they said oh we don't want that anymore and this happens all the
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time in formulating chemicals and products,
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for especially fertilizers and biostimulants she's like well this is a killer
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product i know it's a killer product it's a brilliant it's product so i went
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around some other manufacturers went to a company called doff who make all the
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fertilizers that go in all the big box stores here in the uk,
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and the guy there said can you mix it with humic acid and i was like and my
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heart just dropped i was thinking you don't understand this product if you think
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that adding humic acid to it would be the would be beneficial you know sort
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of lego product this plus that so i said right i'm gonna.
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Commercialize it myself so we're with a number of companies over the
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years to commercialize it and now we sell
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it as gold leaf or liquid gold and it's very
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much more than just the beginner one part fertilizer that
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we set out to make it's probably not the
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the main reason people move to gold leaf is that
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fat it's it's got so much more so it's got a
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dechlorinator in it so that's very important when it
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comes to tap water when you're
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using tap water because chlorine has a
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significant but small small but significant effect on
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on plant growth so it automatically dechlorinates it's ph
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perfect that means that you don't need to use ph
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up and ph down to get the persigation solution into the sweet spots and even
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when you add things like silica or acidic products or other alkaline products
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it drags it back down into the sweet spots so it's ph perfect and that's really
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important because it's easier saves you time and it's.
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Also removes the need for having ph up and
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ph down in your grow room and when you think about a a risk
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assessment you're trying to remove a hazard for
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that's the first thing you're trying to do before you try and minimize it so just
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not having dangerous acids and alkalis around is very
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important and also in in a domestic situation i would
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not have ph up ph down anywhere near my children
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because it's just unthinkable if
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they got their hands on ph up and ph down so i
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would that's great for a domestic situation it
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also contains organic carbon so it's got a biostimulant
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in there and and another major
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advantage of it was that it became the most concentrated base nutrient that
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was on the market in hydroponics so there isn't another base nutrient that weighs
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as much as it as that does and contains as much nutrition in one liter so one
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litre of gold leaf or liquid gold can weigh up to 1.4 kilograms,
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which is massive. That's really heavy.
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One of the unique selling points is literally just to take a five litre bottle,
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you know, let someone hold it and then them to be shocked by how heavy it is.
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So it's because of those unique features, the dechlorination, the pH perfect,
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the biostimulant, the fact that it's so concentrated, it
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actually is so much more than a beginner fertilizer it's
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actually a product that's used by people who
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want to produce really good crops and when you grow against
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the leading fertilizer in the uk hydroponic
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fertilizer the a and the b type products it out
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yields them like we've done studies and shown side by side repeat replicated
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trials that they out yield it they also produce a better architecture in the
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plant so because of the the higher the way the nitrogen the form the nitrogen's
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in you produce a shorter plant that's got more branches than a conventional plant and also,
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Now the product has been released in America for a number of years.
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It's worn hundreds of cups.
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And so it's got cup-winning quality on the produce.
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So that's fantastic. And then the heavy metals are really low in the product as well.
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So we use the purest forms of raw materials. So we're really happy with that.
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I mean, I've seen the analysis of some products coming out of North America
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from, I think it was Oregon or somewhere like that.
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And they had it was analyzed and
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had uranium in the product as well i've seen that analysis
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so crazy uh things like that and so
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gold leaf is it's one of those products that if
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you if you sort of if you know you know at the moment
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i mean sales are good but they're not you
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won't see in every grow shop in the u.s and that's
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because the sort of boom of hydroponics from
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just before covid onwards for a
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year or two it was considered a shop killing type product
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because people why would i sell one
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product if you're a shop owner when you could sell 12 products to a grower
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if they're making lots of money then people could sell 12 now that
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the market's more rational in 2025 and people
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are you know wanting value for money and they also
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probably get sick of applying 12 different products and so
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we're seeing gold leaf is is really
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ramping up now and people are really getting on onto it
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and understanding it obviously it's a different way of growing
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than using a and a b and a ph up and ph down and you
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know pk and you know everything else it is
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compatible with those sorts of finishing resin type producing products silicas
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and things like that but you don't necessarily need them cal mags are always
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a good option they're they're like a security safety blanket and then you know
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in 2025 we've potentially got tariffs on cheaper for generic products coming
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in from Holland and places like that.
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And what you've got to remember is most hydroponic fertilizers fall into what
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I consider to be families.
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And these families exist because people have moved from one company to another,
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they've taken the formulations with them, or people have separated companies
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out, joined companies together.
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And so a lot of companies are using the same formulations. And it's really only
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routes to market and marketing that is actually differentiating them.
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You know you go around a grow shop in north
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america look at the ingredients and apart from
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gold leaf you'd struggle to see a
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product that had a radically different formulation on the
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back than than the standards so
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certainly in the uk you've got people re-bottling for
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other people and so that the really is you
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know if you want to try something truly different then definitely
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try gold leaf and i'd love to know your feedback i've
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been asked another thing i've been at is that about gold if he's been asked over
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the years oh can we dilute it and sell it in
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this way and and the answer to that is no
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you can't dilute it it has to be as concentrated as
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it is or it won't work it the the
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technology relies on it being that concentrated and
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also i don't want to dilute it for because i
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don't want to cheapen the product and i want to see it keep it as a premium
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product that is expensive but you're getting it for one litre you can make a
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hell of a lot of fertiliser with it you know we want to reduce plastic use if
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possible and one of the ways to do that is to stop selling.
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Diluted product miracle grow sell pre-diluted
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fertilizer so you don't even have to add any water
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in the uk i think that's immoral i think they're wasting tons and tons of plastic
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that's going into landfill or being you know recycled in inverted commas and
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you know i think miracle grow need to have a long hard look at themselves and
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say yes you're creating shareholder value but is that a good thing for the environment?
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So I would rather keep gold leaf as concentrated as possible and reduce plastic use.
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You will see there are differences between the bottles in different countries
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when it comes to gold leaf or in the UK liquid gold and you might say oh it
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doesn't contain every nutrient in this one.
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It does, it's just that in the US you need to reach a certain threshold to declare
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a nutrient on the guaranteed analysis.
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Now the problem with that is that if you
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were to increase the nutrients in all
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of those categories to the level where they could be declared it
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wouldn't be in the right ratios required by the plant so
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we don't want to be increasing molybdenum to the level where it has to
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be on the label because there'd be far too
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much molybdenum it'd be poisonous to humans and to
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anyone eating the crop and probably to the plants themselves so
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you can rest assured that you know if you look at the ingredients you
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will find all 12 essential nutrients in
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there i've refused to include nickel i
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don't believe nickel to be an important plant nutrient and
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central plant nutrient it is available as a contaminant in
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all growing systems same with chlorine you're always going to have enough chlorine
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chlorine is required in ridiculously small amounts and it is contaminant even
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in purified water so i don't we don't include them as essential nutrients in
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gold leaf because you're never going to get deficiency in them and that's the
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important point you know when you compare it to other nutrients a A lot of people say,
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when we talk about Goldleaf, one of the funny things is,
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especially in America, is there's lots of companies who say,
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oh yes, we've got a very similar product.
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And you'll go, go on, give us a little. And that used to get me really anxious.
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And I used to think, oh no, somebody's copied it.
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Or someone's got some, somebody's already done it. Oh no, I've just overlooked it.
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And then you'd eventually get the label and you'd go, but that doesn't contain sulfur.
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And they go, yeah, yeah, but it contains all the other ones.
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And you're like, yeah, but you say you've copied a Ferrari, but it's only got three wheels.
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That's effing useless, isn't it?
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So it's normally sulfur is deficient in all of
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the the crystalline the granular products
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and then in the liquid products calcium is always is
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normally always missing and maybe sulfur as well and then a lot of acidic products
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that don't contain the micronutrients but yeah it i've had every other one part
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analyzed by atomic absorption spectroscopy and other analysis and i'm more than
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confident that we can state that we're the only product that contains every essential.
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Plant nutrient i was at canna con in oklahoma there's a
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company coming up to me and they said oh yeah we've got investment from wall street
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and we've got nasa scientists involved like i
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couldn't really give a flying if you've
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got nasa scientists involved they're rocket scientists what do they know about fertilizer
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and say oh yeah we've got a product just the
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same and we're going to launch it yeah nasa never
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did launch their amazing fertilizer it
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turned out that was during the big boom in hydroponics
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and legalization in the us but yeah so
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if you want to try gold leaf then please get
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onto our website and try it by a bottle i
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know you won't be disappointed the key thing is to shake
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the bottle before you use it to activate the technology really
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good shake first time you use it make sure it's a creamy golden
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color we did launch a product in the
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uk called liquid gold leaf and
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that's a different product now that's that is my old formulation and
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it's white and it shouldn't be white so i don't know why they are selling a
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white product because gold leaf is gold i should have said this at the start
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really because of the iron in the product and we've iterated and made the product
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even better since that formulation so that was like one of the really early formulations.
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And i've lost control of that product really so liquid gold
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leaf it's sold in house plants in the uk it's a
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white product but you couldn't use it in hydroponics because you'd
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get magnesium deficiencies you'd get iron deficiencies
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it's nowhere near nowhere near the product that we
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have now and that was launched in the us so
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if you've got any questions about gold leaf i'm more than happy to answer
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them and yeah we'd
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really love to work with growers who are using it and we're setting up a community
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or we set up a community it's really getting going now on facebook so check
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that out as well and if you're coming to any shows where we're at then let me
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know okay that's been hydroponics daily for today how i invented gold leaf thank you very much.