these lids seem to very expensive

When I grew Strike, it was okay but wasn't anything like....you know...noticeably more productive than any other bush bean. I always get great yields from pretty much any bean variety I plan, though, and I usually have 7 to 9 varieties planted at one time. I do innoculate the seed, and I plant as early as the weather allows in order to get great production before the summer heat sets in and ruins everything. I also rotate the beans to new beds every year. The ad copy they write to get us to try different varieties always makes everything sound so incredibly productive, and I try not to fall for it because my real-life results seldom match the glowing ad copy, but we still get all the beans we can eat fresh and enough to preserve to get us through to the next bean season.

I can 600-800 jars of food a year, including last summer, although with all the rain, I might have only canned 500-600 jars in 2015 ( I tend to lose track after a while), and I have had only had one Ball or Kerr lid fail from that many jars. I wasn't aware folks were having trouble with the jar lids. I agree with oldokie that those lids seem cost-prohibitive for someone who does a lot of canning. I certainly wouldn't spend that kind of money on jar lids. If good canning equipment gets that costly, I'll just freeze and dehydrate more food than what I already do.

I do remember when Wal-Mart came out with their own line of canning jars a few years ago (cheaply made, thin jars, I believe made in China) and lots of folks had trouble with both the cheap jars and cheap lids. I don't know if Wal-Mart still has those cheap jars and lids sold under their Mainline (or whatever it was) brand, but I don't buy and use them.

The only lids I have had to fail are the red and white checked lids that Walmart sold under the Better Homes and Garden brand. I bought one box of those cheap jars, and didn't like them.

We planted about 100 bean plants last year and harvested about 1 gallon of beans. They never bloomed.

The lids are about the same price that we pay here and that includes the shipping.

I buy the Mainstay jars for jelly and water bathed salsa because when I give it away I know the jars will not be coming home. I would never put them under pressure.

ssurbangardener, Did the heat get there too early last year? That's when I have bean issues---when the heat arrives extra early before the beans even get going good in terms of blooming and setting beans. Even in a good year, if I plant at the OSU-recommended time, I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping we get a bunch of beans picked before the heat arrives.

Last year was the rare year here in southcentral OK when the last freeze was early so I planted beans really early, and the onset of summer heat was blessedly late. It was awesome if you don't mind stomping around in the garden in muck boots while raindrops are falling on your head and water is standing several inches deep in the garden pathways between the raised beds. I picked beans forever even though we had to fight our way through bean rust and, eventually, after 2' of rain fell in May alone (after it had been extra rainy ever since mid-June of the previous year), the bean plants began rotting off at the soil line. Since I had plants in four different raised beds at different parts of the garden, we didn't lose them all at once. By the time I removed the last bean plants from the last raised bed, which might have been in July, we were sick of looking at beans, picking them, eating them, blanching them and freezing them. Any year that we get enough beans to get sick of them is a great year, if you know what I mean. All to often, we get too hot too early and the beans struggle. With everything that I preserve, I try to put up 2 or 3 years worth in a good year to help tide us through the bad years, and it generally works out pretty well.

Mainstay! That was the name of those horribly thin jars. I did buy a box and try them and hated how thin they were. I did only use them for salsa and gave them all away. A lot of the 100+ people we gift with salsa every year do save the jars and return them, so I get a lot of my canning jars returned to me every year, but no one returned those stupid Mainstay jars and I'm glad.

Carol, I thought the gingham checked lids were the cutest thing and bought a couple of packages of them when they were on clearance sale, but I believe I only used them for jellies or jams. I just didn't trust any non-name-brand canning supplies by that point, having already discovered how thin and weak the Mainstay jars were.

A friend of mine recently gave up canning. She probably is in her late 70s or early 80s although she is so young-at-heart that she doesn't seem that old to me. She said if I'd come by and get them, I could have all her canning jars. Woo hoo! I need to remember to do that this weekend.

Last year was the only bad year for beans that I have had in this garden. I had beautiful pole bean plants that bloomed a lot but didn't set pods until late Fall. Usually I have more beans than I want, but not 2015. I normally plant bush beans first, pick for a few weeks, then yank them out when the pole beans start. The pole beans usually produce all summer and fall for me.