What 5 Years Of Canning Has Taught Us As Homesteaders

Learning how to can homegrown food is a homesteading skill you can do in the city, suburbs, and on 40 acres!  See mistakes newbie homesteaders made so you don’t make the same mistakes!

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Canning Is A Great Homesteading Skill To Have!

Learning to preserve food is one of those homesteading skills that can be easily learned in a suburban setting.  However, we definitely learned from some mistakes along the way!  See what mistakes we made so you can shorten your learning curve!

Jars We Actually Need

When we first started canning and practicing homesteading skills, we started by stocking up on half pints, pints, quarts, and even half-gallon jars.  Both in standard (regular) mouth jars and wide mouth. 

One thing we learned super early in the process was that we don’t need we only really needed the regular mouth pints and the wide mouth quarts!  The half gallons might be used for juice once we move to our new homestead and we get apple picking but right now, they have been relegated to storing seeds as a mini seed vault with different seed packets and storing drying beans.

As for the half-pints, well folks, let me tell you that there absolutely is such a thing as too many jams and jellies!  Seriously, there are things that we canned like 5 years ago and we haven’t used.  Now we need to empty the jars and clean them out ready to use or move.  That brings me nicely to our next lesson learned.

Quantity Matters

Ok so along with like 100 jars of jam or pepper jelly, we have like 1000 jars of chutney.  What is chutney I hear you ask!  It’s a sweet and tangy condiment.  Pairs great with cheese boards, cold meat, and a cheese sandwich.  It isn’t well known here in the US, which makes it hard to give as gifts. 

So one of the lessons we learned was that just because you have a recipe and enough ingredients to make 40 jars of chutney, pickles, relish, jam or whatever, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.  If it is a new recipe or a condiment you have not tried before, do only a small batch!  Most canning recipe batches are around 6 to 10 jars.

I wish I had stuck to the small-batch, especially with the pepper jelly.  My husband said they were good for glazing meat.  There they sit, all alone.  Even ones that so get opened end up in the back of the fridge for months on end waiting to be used.

Keep Produce In Sight

You know the old saying out of sight, out of mind? Well if your home-canned produce remains out of sight, it will be forgotten.  Make it a habit to add your home canned goods to your meal plan so they will get used.

Your Needs Will Change

Your go-to recipes for canning and needs for canning on your homestead will change as your skills develop and you get more confident.  For example, we started with jams, jellies, and chutney.  Then we stepped up to a pressure canner.  Now we can meat, veggies, soups, stews, stocks, and broths.  We make up mid-week meals of farmer’s soup as we call it or stew that is perfect for last-minute, mid-week meals.

Our needs have evolved as our skills growing food in the garden have developed too.  We make passata, homemade pasta sauce, pickled green beans with spicy peppers, or even quarts of canned chili when we have a lot of beans and peppers.  Fruits do better as frozen fruits where they can be used in desserts, smoothies, or just added to oatmeal rather than being made into jam.  Our tastes for food have changed and so has the method we choose to preserve the harvest.

Zucchini is a good example, do you remember we made it into chutney?  Now we freeze the excess or turn it into zucchini lasagna then freeze it for an easier family meal.  The more we have lived as homesteaders in the suburbs, the more we have learned about how the homestead pieces fit together with us as a family.

Plan Your Canning Days

This was a big lesson for me, especially when I work full time.    As best can you can, plan the days you will be preserving or canning.  You can guestimate based on the days to maturity for your plants (remember that garden journal and taking notes!) when you expect a harvest to begin.  Make a note of the days, put it on a memo or on the calendar so you don’t forget then see about getting help!

Reach out to friends and see if they would be willing to do a potluck and help you can.  You get to spend time with friends and preserve!  It’s a winner!

Canning days can be tough.  They are definitely busy!   Between my husband and I, one of us is cleaning and sanitizing while the other is prepping ingredients or heating ingredients over the stove.  One of us is filling jars while the other is wiping rims and screwing on lids.  Whilst the canner is coming up to temperature or pressure and being monitored carefully to start the timer, the other is cleaning and sanitizing to start the next batch.  There’s a lot of collaboration in homesteading and preserving or canning produce out of the garden is no exception!

Plan Your Garden

I may have eluded to this a little bit when talking about the needs of the homestead changing.  When you are considering what to can and preserve, this is something that you should sit down and discuss as a family when you are planning your garden.  For example, on my homestead, we eat a lot of Italian food.  We go through tomatoes like water runs through sand!  As such, we try to plan out how many jars of pasta sauce for example we would use in a year.

Let’s say we use 52 quart-size jars of pasta sauce a year. We would look up a recipe for pasta sauce in quarts and see how many tomatoes we would need then use that information to plan approximately how many tomato plants we would need.  I know we need 18-25 tomato plants growing to produce enough tomatoes to keep us in pasta sauce for a year.  Then we plan out the garden since we know how many plants we need and the space we have available.

Why 18 to 25 plants?  Well, 18 plants would be the rockstar veggies that grow well in our region.  Those that have consecutively produced reliable harvests.  We would add in a couple of plants here and there of new varieties we were trying in the garden.  If we have brand new varieties, we plant a number of extra plants to account for losing some due to disease, pests, or they don’t ripen or produce fruit in the growing season we have!

Dig In and Learn More

If this post has started ideas for your garden, be sure to check out these related posts and helpful books:

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