Purdue Extension Service

Vanderburgh County, Indiana

Read the Instructions for Safe Gardens and Maple Syrup

By Larry Caplan, Extension Horticulture Educator, Vanderburgh County, IN

For the Evansville Courier and Press, March 1, 2009

This weekend (March 7 and 8), I will be participating in the annual Wesselman Woods Nature Preserve Maple Sugarbush Festival, which runs from 7 am to 1 pm both days. I will be out there all morning Sunday, leading groups through the woods and explaining how maple trees are tapped to produce yummy maple syrup.

Every year when I help the Wesselman Nature Society with this program, I'm reminded of the fellow who called me about 23 years ago. He'd asked us to mail him a brochure about making maple syrup, seeing as how he had his own maple trees. In his excitement to make his own syrup, he missed the first line of the instructions: "Set up your boiling operation OUTDOORS."

You see, in New England, it takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. Our trees in southern Indiana don't have as high a sugar content, so it can take up to 80 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. The other 79 gallons is water, and needs to be boiled away.

Well, my caller had not read the first line of the instructions, so he started boiling his sap INDOORS, in his kitchen. By the time he called me, he had steamed all of the wallpaper off his kitchen walls, warped his cabinets shut, and had caused a tropical rainstorm in his living room.

I bring this up because I notice this same occurrence in other gardening activities. Neglecting to read the instructions, or not reading them carefully, can lead to all sorts of problems. For instance, new gardeners can get all excited about tilling up the yard in the spring, but they don't catch the warning to only till up the soil if it's dry. As a consequence, they compact the soil and create multitudes of soil clods, which dry into bricks.

By far the most serious problems come from not reading the instructions when using pesticides. While weed killers, bug killers, and other chemicals can be useful tools, their misuse can have wide-ranging consequences. Mishandling pesticides can kill bees, birds and fish; they can sicken the applicator or their family; they can contaminate water supplies; and they can even kill the plant you are trying to protect.

We've still got several weeks before it's warm enough to do any kind of gardening. Now is the perfect time to get out your gardening books and publications and read them through again. Grab a magnifying glass and read the labels on all your pesticides and fertilizers, to make sure you know how they should be used. This will save you time later...not because you won't need to read the labels again later (you will), but because you won't have to fix costly mistakes. As the old saying goes, "There's never enough time to do the job right, but there's always time to do the job over!"

For more information on gardening and pesticide safety, contact the Purdue Extension Service at (812) 435-5287.