I did it! I learned to can. Just tomatoes so far. But it feels like I made the big leap.
I’ve been wanting to can since reading (and re-reading) Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. For those of you who haven’t read the book, it’s about a year in which her family eats only locally grown food. They grow and preserve much of it themselves, and there’s a whole chapter on tomatoes and canning them. I can’t say I’ve put much thought into canning before reading her book.
But after mentioning I wanted to learn, a friend e-mailed me about a canning workshop offered by our county’s cooperative extension. It was only $5 for an amazing, super comprehensive 3 hour tomato canning workshop!
Now my tomato patch is minuscule compared to Kingsolvers and this is the most tomatoes I’ve had ripe in one sitting–enough for the four pints I canned this weekend. Next time I’d supplement with tomatoes from the farmers market, just to have a full pot of cans (and justify all the work).
Next I want to try jams and jellies!
fightingwindmills said
That’s great! Congratulations on making the big leap. My dad is really good at canning, and I keep waiting until I “grow up” before I learn to do it myself. Good for you for not waiting any longer.
Deanna Godman said
I loved that book too. I haven’t gotten so far as as to start canning, though. I grew up canning and know how much work it can be (my parents have a huge garden and we did supply most of our own food growing up). While the book was inspiring, I only read it in January, which isn’t enough time to implement it by summer, and I can’t seem to get my hubby on board even a little bit. Maybe in the next few years. We do like to garden but between the weather, work schedule and broken equipment it just wasn’t meant to be this year. Congrats on your canned tomatoes!
Dayna said
I just finished up some pickles! You inspired me to call our coop. They said they might just find a teacher and offer a class here
THANKS
Amy said
Jean, I read the Kingsolver as well and was similarly inspired. I canned some local organic strawberries and some sweet cherries we picked in the mountains above Mt Airy. Levering Orchard, you guys would love it. And just this past week I got my Grandma’s old granite-ware canner and rack–she’s not canning anymore and was happy to see it off to a new home. Maybe I’ll try tomatoes too… It’s a lot of work and a little intimidating too! Your class sounds great.
cygnetsmall said
Where do you find the time?! How amazing. I got our scanner fixed so I will attempt to get the pictures of my crabapple jelly making scanned in over the next couple of weeks in case you are still interested. Also, I’ve been meaning to read that book for quite a while now, I just never seem to be able to get past the kids section at either the library or bookstore!
megan said
we just recently canned tomatoes, tomato sauce and salsa.
check out my blog sometime
wendy said
I grew up in a home that did a lot of canning. I still love to visit in the fall so I can smell my parents canning grape juice and get a drink of it hot and pure as it goes into the bottles. My mom canned jam too but she did it the easy way by purifying the bottles and then just freezing the jam in jars. Make sure to leave a little room at the top if you do this as the jam will expand in the freezer and could break a glass jar!
Mozi Esme's Mommy said
Very cool! It IS an awful lot of work though – so not on my to do list for another few years (like when baby is ready to help with the work!)
wesleyjeanne said
We love to can and make lots of jam. You’ll find the jam especially rewarding. We make it all summer as fruits ripen: strawberry, blackberry, blueberry, peach. In winter we make orange marmelade (my favorite). We’ve also canned homemade salsa, pasta sauce, and two kinds of tomatoes and eaten off them all winter. We only do ones we can do in a boiling water canner, though, I don’t have a pressure canner (but I’d love to).
It’s easy to get hooked on enjoying the summer harvest all winter. Plus it makes good gifts.
Oh, we can peaches, too.
We use the Ball Blue Book for most recipes and for our jam we simply use the recipes in the Sure-Jel package. We like the recipes for cooked jams not freezer jams–it’s better somehow. It gives consistently good results each time. Make sure to adjust processing time to reflect your altitude, though. read the package and it’ll tell you.
Good luck
MamaBird/SurelyYouNest said
Oooh. I haven’t made the leap yet but my SIL cans lots of tomato sauce each summer (enough to last them all year). I aspire to your lovely looking jars!
Helena said
sooo are you going to tell us how you did it?
)
they look great!
sharleen said
I loved Animal Vegetable Miracle. That book made me want to make my own cheese. You should try the 30-minute mozzarella. It’s fun, easy, satisfying and delicious!
Barbara Kingsolver was also on the NPR show Speaking of Faith recently. It was an interesting interview about the “ethics of eating”.
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/ethicsofeating/
chrys said
i’m reading that book right now and all i can think of is eating fresh asparagus! (i’m clearly not very far into the book yet.) but enjoying it!
chrys
tinasquirrel said
I just did my first “canning” this weekend! It was so awesome. We were on vacation in Downeast Maine, and I bought 20 pounds of wild Maine blueberries. Yummy! They are so good. So, I now have 20 jars of blueberry jam staring at me and the jam is so amazingly good. I printed out the recipe from pickyourown.org, I think is the website. I decided to go with the boiling water bath canning process as it seemed like it would last longer, as well as the fact that then I didn’t have to freezer store all that jam. I used 10 cups of fresh blueberries, the low sugar pectin, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/2 cup water and 4.5 cups of sugar. Definitely sweet. I can’t imagine what the non-low sugar recipe would taste like! That calls for 7.5 cups of sugar!
I hope our tomato plants are prolific enough for me to can some tomatoes! Right now, they are all still green. And with all this rain that we have been having, I’m not sure when they are going to ripen!
The other book you might look into is Putting Food By, by Janet Greene. It’s a great reference for all sorts of different ways of preserving food. And they are conscious of the fact that it is more economical to preserve foods in some ways other than other ways. Like freezer storing is expensive (energy, etc.), so you want to be aware of the cost of the methods you choose.
This is our first year having a garden (new house, and we couldn’t do it in the old house), and it has been so exciting and rewarding. Definitely worthy of the time and effort! We are already thinking about how to expand it next year.
nikki said
I’ve been reading the same book and I’m so inspired. We had already been moving toward eating locally (joined a CSA and started a garden) but I didn’t know there was a movement or name for it! I’m interested in canning and ordered a few books from the library. I just don’t know if I’ll really have time to do it or if I would really use the food once canned. I have a Tilia Foodsaver but we really need a separate freezer if I start that up. Was canning really so easy? I’m drowning in tomatoes!