I am going to start canning next year :o(

[sparks]

Canning is great! I have a day off today and my car is in the garage. I was grumbling to my DH that all summer I had something to do with canning. I have nothing today. Now I have to clean!
Keep an eye on the thrift stores. Now people will be donating canning supplies. Hard to believe!

 

[Emerald]

I just let it be known that, due to allergies, I was gonna be canning as much of my own garden (or locally grown veggies) as I could to help control what was in them, and I still come home to a few boxes on the porch from friends and family and it has been over 8 or 9 years since I said anything!
Yard sales this year netted me a few really nice wide mouth pint and 1/2 type jars for less than a quarter a piece.

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

The reason I do not want to can, is because of the damage that is done to the food.
For sure, I will avoid pressure canning.
Hot water bathing will be what I will try and do.
Praying we can get a root cellar going soo as well, so I can keep the canning to a minimum.

 

[Emerald]

The reason I do not want to can, is because of the damage that is done to the food.
For sure, I will avoid pressure canning.
Hot water bathing will be what I will try and do.
Praying we can get a root cellar going soo as well, so I can keep the canning to a minimum.

I can mainly jellies, jams and tomato products with a hot water bath.
for the pressure canning I do mainly meats.
For now since it is quite cheap for me I do have a freezer full of veggies and some meats as I prefer the quality that they have when they are properly blanched/processed and vac-packed.
My freezer is pretty new and only costs us about $25 a year to run-sure the first month was slightly more to get everything cold and keep it there but since then I keep it full with gallons of water ( a full freezer uses less electricity to keep it cold and thaws much slower if you lose power)when I start using stuff and then I use the frozen gallons(old milk jugs) to put in the coolers for going anywhere! We kept an eye on the bills the first few months and now we don't worry about it.
Now tho I am dehydrating my potatoes as they are so much easier to use and flavor wise just as nice if not better then when I used to can them-I just am not a big fan of them frozen- the only way I like to freeze them included deep frying them till just done and then freezing and then either fry them straight out of the freezer or baking them and quite frankly I don't even want to know how fattening that is!

Personally I am not as worried about food quality by pressure canning as I am by using store bought canned foods- they use pressure canning and the lining of those cans(most of the time anyways) has BPA in it and the food sits right against the can liner.. At least with my canning lids(they too have BPA) the food is not touching the lid(when properly done) so I am going out on a limb here and gonna declare that since they are not touching the lids then I am gonna get less leaching into my food then the store bought cans where the food just sits right next to the lining.
Unless you have a green house that you can afford to 1. heat, 2. keep artificially lit at certain times of the year, pressure canning is not the worst food in the world.--sure I like my fresh garden foods best, followed by freezer food and then even dehydrated food comes before canned, but I would rather eat food I did myself by canning before starving or letting it go to waste.
(crap! that kinda sounded like a soap box rant there! Sorry folks I kinda get carried away sometimes about food and preserving and nutrition!)

 

[CrimsonRose]

Here Here! Emerald! I agree with all of that... anything homegrown is better than the crap they have on the shelves... most canned goods was from last years harvest... they sit in warehouses till shipped to stores so they are almost a year old by the purchase date... where as home canned food doesn't sit in my cabinets more than a year! (some jelly's might but I don't eat those for nutrition anyhow... ROFL) Plus I have no need to put in extra salt or "flavor enhanced" chemicals and what not they add to food to preserve it longer... if pressure canned right no need to add anything other than water to most stuff...

 

[Nick]

Have any of you thought of dehydrating frozen vegetables and dry-canning them--no water bath or heat-sealing needed! Here's a link I came across recently after seeing if anyone else was also dehydrating instead of wet-canning:

http://survivalprep.net/tag/food-storage/

Really, you can dehydrate and dry-can year-round. The wife and I have been working on dehydrating a lot of spinach, carrots, peppers and bananas I've bought frozen from the store (well, the bananas weren't frozen). I could wait until my garden hopefully comes up this spring and summer, but dehydrating frozen vegetables is giving me a jump-start on stuff. We've dehydrated probably about 25 pounds of frozen carrots and spinach this past week. Take a look at some of the pictures that are at the link above--kind of cool when you think about how space-efficient dehydrated stuff is. It looks like that person has eight pounds of carrots (I'm assuming that's the pre-dehydrated weight) of carrots per mason jar, and those look like they're probably quart jars. We've been using pint jars and get about half as much dehydrated vegetables in the pints as this person looks like he's getting in his quart jars. But yeah, the dehydration is a huge space-saver and can be done year-round.