General canning

I used to can more than freezing our produce but lately even with 4 freezers, we need to leave room for our meats. We will be splitting a steer and pig with our son and daughter-in-law this year in addition to the wild game Sonny brings in. 

I do have some news. I have made a video of our place and will put a link up later here on my blog. I really need to redo the looks of my blog. I set this up when I was making vintage crafts and had my shop. Now I mainly want to concentrate on our homestead.

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Today's post will mainly show a few canning basics. These will just be random photos of what we have done with basic descriptions.

We mainly can shell beans. I'll show later what we do with green beans. We sit on our patio with 2 fans running and do our shelling. Then we wash the beans and blanch.

Then I bottle and use the juice from the blanch to pour over my beans only up to the bottom ring of the screw part. That leaves about an inch headspace.

I had a hard time finding canning lids. It seems with this pandemic people must be stocking up. All the stores were completely out. I usually keep a lot on hand but since we didn't can last year, I thought then I would stock up this year. Well finally found some of these I could buy in bulk. They were cheaper than the ball and really I like them much better. The seal is wider and thicker and so far our jars have sealed well. Not sure how they will last over the long haul. We'll see. 
We always pressure can our beans and peas. Anything with high sugar or acid content we water bath. 
Here is our canner. You don't have to have an expensive canner but I'd dearly love to own the All American pressure canner. If you can afford it, that is the one to buy. But I've managed over 30+years to get by with 2 of these presto canners. 

I basically prepare the jars for canning and then we carry outside and do the pressure and water bath canning. This keeps heat and humidity from steaming up our house. 
Once they are canned and the pot has cooled. We remove from the canner and completely cool on our picnic table. Then I label jars and wipe down and store. 
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A personal preference for us with green beans....we really don't like them canned. They lose their flavor after a couple of months. So basically we dill them. I just treat them the same as I do when I make dill pickles. 

I make lots of relish, salsa and pickled things. The bottom photo the jar on the right is blueberry syrup. All these we only water bath. 
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Well sad to say I tried to upload my video this morning to youtube and think my file must be too big. I will try to revideo tomorrow morning with my big camera and up load from my computer. 
So until tomorrow.......