When I first started being successful at gardening after we moved to our 5-acre homestead, I didn’t have a plan to speak of. I just decided what we would eat the most of, had a rough idea of how much each plant would produce after looking at a chart, and then did some quick math and planted from there. I way overplanted, and even with 6 kids and two adults in the household and feeding friends on the weekend, I had plenty left over. This was my first introduction to preserving my own food. I had figured out how to freeze a lot of it, which was a practice I eventually perfected over time once I knew what we liked frozen, what we didn’t, what really needed to be blanched before freezing and what I could get away with just tossing in a freezer bag and calling it good. But canning? That was something I had never attempted. I hadn’t even ever been exposed to it. But I’m not one to shy away from a challenge and I regularly have more confidence than I do sense and so I bought a book, I bought the fewest supplies necessary on our miniscule budget to do some basic canning, and jumped in with both feet. At the end of that season we had a shelf full of jams and pickles, salsa and stewed tomatoes, and pasta sauce and I was bitten by the preserving bug.
There is something very satisfying about growing your own food, for sure, and being able to walk out into the garden to pick your lunch or your dinner. But, in the dead of a Midwest winter, the ability to be able to “shop” your own pantry for the things you eat the most, that you grew, that is a whole other level.
So, today on Just Grow Something we’re going to talk about the basic necessities you need for starting your own canning adventure. We’ll mostly focus on boiling-water canning and what can be safely canned in that manner, but since I jumped head first into pressure canning just a year after I started water-bath canning, we’ll touch on some of the differences in case, you too, are big on confidence but maybe a little shy on knowledge. Let’s dig in!
Links mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes on my website at JustGrowSomethingPodcast.com!
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National Center for Home Food Preservation: nchfp.uga.edu/
Ball Blue Book (new edition): amzn.to/4cmLpH8
13 сен 2024
