by Tracy Falbe

Preserving your own food with home canning techniques is no longer the dying art of grandmothers and church ladies. Younger people and families are reviving home canning, but you need fresh food in bulk in order to preserve it.

So, how do you get the produce without spending too much?

Growing the food yourself is the obvious, but not only answer. Home gardeners have been canning their fruits and vegetables for generations. Planting a garden and putting in some fruit trees are definitely rewarding. You will get the freshest and most convenient produce this way, but you probably can’t grow everything you want. Time and space limitations often restrict your ability to produce in quantity as well, but you do have options.

Farmers’ markets are expanding all over the country and they offer you a great way to buy fruits, vegetables and other produce. Check your local daily or weekly newspapers for ads and articles about farmers’ markets in your area. The markets are often located in downtowns, so check with your chamber of commerce or downtown business associations for information about farmers’ markets. The website www.localharvest.org has a searchable database of farmers throughout the United States that may be helpful as a starting point too.

You will likely find that you have more than one market in your area through the summer. While you’re at the market, you will be able to meet growers of the types of food in which you’re most interested. Growers often open their farms to the public, and you can find out if you can connect with them directly outside the market venue. They often have bulk deals at the farms. At the market, expect to pay retail prices. Sometimes the prices are better than the supermarket, but you will still be at the retail level.

You-pick or U-pick farms are also widespread. These operations are popular for berries and fruits. You can find them through ads in local publications and signs on the side of the road. Sometimes your vendors at the farmers’ market have u-pick operations too, so be sure to ask. You can get a great price on produce at the u-pick farms because you are supplying the labor and transportation.

I just paid $1.50 a quart for strawberries by picking them myself. The work was a little dirty but otherwise a fairly pleasant activity. It actually felt nice to be out there with other people harvesting food.

People have been doing this since we were wearing fig leaves, and the experience had a natural and serene quality. If I had to do it all day, the work would have been backbreaking, but it’s a nice outing for an hour to get food for your family at a great price. You will certainly gain a deep empathy with the underpaid people who have to put in long days harvesting the food sold at the supermarket.

Another emerging way to find produce is www.craigslist.org. If your community has an active Craigslist be sure to frequently scan the ads in the farm and garden category. This will alert you to deals on local produce, markets, and u-pick farms.

Road side stands usually have decent prices as well. The produce tends to be very fresh because the stands are often right next to the fields.

You can reasonably expect to find good prices on fresh produce during peak seasons. With a little effort you can find the best growers and obtain quality food for home canning.

When I picked strawberries the other day, I paid $12 for 8 quarts. This would have easily cost $24 at the market, so I gained a 50 percent discount with under 1 hour of labor. With that 8 quarts of super fresh strawberries, I put up 18 half pints of jam, made a strawberry crisp dessert, and froze about a quart of whole strawberries to use in a pie later. I put in a big day of work, but all that jam will last my family for months and taste better than anything I can buy.

This is the basic recipe for Canning Strawberry Jam:

• 5 cups strawberries
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 package fruit pectin powder
• 7 cups sugar

Fill and heat a water bath canning kettle. Bring the water almost to boiling, at least 180 degrees F and sterilize 8 to 10 half pint canning jars and new lids in the hot water. Set them aside on a clean cloth.

Then in a big sauce pan, add the strawberries and lemon juice. Crush the strawberries with a potato masher while heating to a boil. Once you have a nice berry mash, thoroughly stir in the pectin. Bring this to a hard boil that cannot be stirred down. Then stir in the appalling amount of sugar. Keep stirring until you reach that hard rolling boil again. Maintain the boiling for 1 full minute and then shut off the heat.

I usually let the jam cool for 5 to 10 minutes and stir it a couple times. Turn the heat back on for your water bath and start filling your jars to within 1/4 inch of the top. Wipe clean the jar edges and put on the lids and bands. Once the water bath is boiling, lower the jars into the water bath and process them for 10 minutes. (If you’re at elevations about 1,000 feet, you may need to process longer. Look for directions specific to your area.)

Remove the jars from the water bath and set them on a counter to cool for 12 to 24 hours. Do not disturb them. You will likely hear the lids pop shut within minutes of taking them out of the water.

You can get many jam and jelly recipes like this one out of the box of fruit pectin. For complete information about home canning and more recipes, please visit and bookmark my website Canning Local http://canning.falbepublishing.com

By guest writer Tracy Falbe

Pickles from the grocery store will not compare to the wonderful pickles you can make yourself and preserve with home canning. Most of my life I detested pickles, but when I learned how to can food, I tried a cucumber pickle recipe…and loved it. You’ll find the recipe below after I explain how pickling works.

The preservation process known as pickling has been around a lot longer than factory-made canning jars. Although pickled foods can last for weeks, even months, you can put them up for a whole year when you combine pickling with home canning. Two more appealing aspects of pickling are it is easy to do and it greatly expands the types of foods you can safely preserve in a boiling water bath canner.

In my previous article that introduced home canning “Good eatin’ from the old timers’ pantry” I explained how the acidity of foods determines which canning method can be safely used. High acid foods can be canned successfully in the boiling water bath and low acid foods require processing in a pressure canner. However, low acid food, which includes most vegetables like cucumbers, corn, okra, beans, peas, zucchini, and peppers, can be pickled and then safely preserved with the simple boiling water bath. With pickling, the acidity of the food is increased by storing it in a pickling solution made with vinegar, which significantly boosts the acidity of the food product. The pickling solution can be enhanced with sugar and spices and thereby create a delicious canned food. Pickling your own foods and canning them really illustrates the high quality food you can obtain with home canning.

Cucumber pickles are a very affordable food to preserve with home canning. Cucumbers generally do not cost much, and, in the summer, home gardeners will happily give you a bag of the prolific vegetables for free. And if you would like to grow some cucumbers, you do not need much space. Four or five plants will bury you in cucumbers. Other vegetables that are great when pickled are beets, zucchini, and okra.

Important to know about pickling:

When making any pickled product, use 5 percent vinegar. This will be specified on the jug’s label. Sometimes you will see 4 percent, but do not use that vinegar for pickling because it is too weak. Also you will need to use pickling salt, which does not have iodine added. The iodine will make the canned goods cloudy. Pickling salt is readily available and it will be labeled as pickling or canning salt.

Sweet bread and butter cucumber pickles canning recipe

10 medium cucumbers

3 medium onions

1/4 cup pickling salt

1 cup 5 percent vinegar

1/2 teaspoon celery seed

1 cup water

1/2 teaspoon mustard seed

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 teaspoon turmeric

Slice the cucumbers thinly and slice the onions too. Place the sliced cucumbers and onions into a large bowl. Pour the pickling salt over them and cover with water. Place a large plate on top of the vegetables to push them down into the brine. Allow the cucumbers and onions to stand for at least 2 hours or overnight. I usually prepare the vegetables in the evening and can them in the morning. This is technically known as a short brine method because the vegetables are only soaking for less than a day.

The next step is to drain the cucumbers and onions from the brine. In a stock pot, add the water, vinegar, celery seed, mustard seed, sugar, and turmeric. Bring everything to a boil and add the cucumbers and onions. Boil gently for 10 to 12 minutes until vegetables are tender. As water cooks out of the cucumbers the solution in the pot should increase.

Pack the pickles into sterilized canning jars and cover with the spicy vinegar solution. Leave 1/2 inch of space at the top, wipe clean the jar rims and apply the lids and bands. Process the pint jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Remove the jars and let them set undisturbed for 24 hours. You will likely hear the jar lids pop within the first few minutes, but don’t touch. The next day, check to make sure the lids have sealed, wipe the jars and lids clean, and store in a cupboard or pantry for up to one year. Label your jars with the date you made them so you will know when they expire.

I have found that depending on how much moisture cooks out of the cucumbers, I sometimes need to boil some extra water to get enough solution in the jars to reach within 1/2 inch of the top. Just add a little boiling water as needed.

If you are entirely new to home canning you can get the directions for sterilizing the jars and processing with a boiling water bath off the box of canning jars and also at my website Canning Local http://canning.falbepublishing.com

By Guest Writer Tracy Falbe
http://canning.falbepublishing.com

Home preservation of food, primarily with home canning, is enjoying a resurgence. People are awakening to the importance of their local food supplies and thinking more about the quality of food on supermarket shelves that can, quite honestly, be from anywhere.

When the growing season is going gangbusters in your area, you can affordably save the bounty of gardens and farms and enjoy the food for up to a year. Instead of buying one little basket of strawberries at the roadside stand, get the whole flat and make jam. For about the same price as buying jam at a store, you will get a superior product that tastes wonderful.

Convincing people of the benefits of home canning is usually not difficult, but the process of preserving food does intimidate people. They worry they won’t do it right and food poison their families. But I can assure you that, as long as you follow the directions, your preserved food will be safe and delicious.

There are two primary methods for canning: A boiling water bath and the pressure canner. All beginners should start with the boiling water bath method. If you never work your way up to using a pressure canner, that’s fine. You can put up many kinds of fruits, jams, relishes, and preserves with just the boiling water method.

What is the difference between the boiling water bath and pressure canning methods?

The difference is the temperature achieved by each process. A boiling water bath can heat food in jars up to the boiling point, 212 degrees Fahrenheit. This temperature is sufficient to safely preserve many foods. With the pressure canner, the food in jars can be heated to 240 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. A pressure canner is simply an oversized pressure cooker that can hold canning jars. By containing the steam from boiling water and pressurizing it, temperatures beyond the boiling point can be reached.

How do I know which canning method to use?

The type of food you wish to preserve determines which canning method you use. Foods that are high acid can all be preserved with a boiling water bath. This is because the acidic chemical composition of the food makes it a poor environment for the bacterium Clostridium botulinum to grow. This bacterium is the source of the deadly botulism toxin. With the concern about botulism mostly absent from high acid foods, the temperatures achieved within a boiling water bath are sufficient to destroy other bacteria and mold spores that may be present.

High acid foods are fruits like apples, peaches, berries of all kinds, cherries, pears, apricots, plums, and so forth.

For foods with a low acid or nonacid chemical composition, the Clostridium botulinum bacterium and its toxins can grow and even thrive. Therefore, you must preserve such foods in the higher temperatures of a pressure canner that can destroy botulism toxins.

Low acid foods are fish, poultry, meat, and most vegetables like potatoes, carrots, corn, peas, peppers, cucumbers and so forth.

Although vegetables are low acid and must be preserved in a pressure canner, you can preserve them in a boiling water bath by pickling the food. Pickling involves using a vinegar solution that boosts the acidity of the food. This is why cucumbers and other vegetables can be pickled and canned with a boiling water bath. Pickled products are perfectly safe when processed in a boiling water bath.

What about canning tomatoes?

Tomatoes are a borderline fruit that possess some acidity but are not quite a high acid food. Tomatoes can be canned safely in a boiling water bath with a little vinegar added. I have successfully canned tomatoes in a boiling water bath, and they were fine. However, the pressure canner does a superior job with tomatoes. The vinegar step can be skipped, and the preserved tomatoes come out with better color and nutrition when processed in the pressure canner.

If you are interested in canning, I recommend starting with the boiling water bath. The big kettle and rack can be purchased for roughly $20 at almost any discount store or grocery. Making jam is a great beginner project. The little boxes of powdered fruit pectin available everywhere the canning jars are sold contain many recipes for jams and jellies along with canning directions.

I am a self taught home canner, and I warn you that it is an addictive hobby. The food you preserve will taste so much better than canned goods from the store. My online canning resource is Canning Local found at http://canning.falbepublishing.com