I can, freeze or dehydrate a large portion of what I grow. There are advantages and disadvantages using any of the three methods. A lot of times it comes down to how much I have to put up and in some cases how much time I have. Small quantities are easier to blanch and freeze or just throw in the dehydrator and deal with a few hours later.

Not having used any of the electric canners, I don't have any recommendations.

Having worn out several vacuum sealers, I would recommend the best you can afford. If a commercial unit isn't feasible, then I would look into some of the models designed for home butchering. Look for the most cycles before a required cool down. Your average FoodSaver from Walmart will need to cool down after about 10 cycles. The heavy duty units will go 50 or more and generally have stronger vacuum and have a wider seal. For most users, 10 cycles sounds like plenty, but in the long run, you will replace the cheaper units 3-5 times more often than the heavy duty units.

Cost can be a factor when it comes to vacuum bags, whereas, once jars are purchased, they will last years. Lids are cheap by comparison.

I too use all three of the above methods. I too have the same type of cook-top and I have a FoodSaver. I signed up for e-mails on the FoodSaver website and was notified of special sales so I paid less than I would have at WM. I buy the rolls in a large box at Sams. That all being said - I still prefer canning. I use a 2-burner camping Coleman Stove for this out on the back deck. I prepare everything in the kitchen and take the jars outside to process. It's a nice reprieve from a hot kitchen!

If you search garden web for "canning on a glass top stove", you will find several threads. You can also search for any canner you're thinking about. You can get countertop electric burners, which some people use. DH bought a 2 burner propane stove last year (not a camping stove, but on legs). I told him there was NO WAY I was canning outside, but he wanted it. Some people do can on those. I think freezing retains the best nutrition and flavor. I have researched the effects dehydrating has on nutrition, with confusing results. Some nutrients are lost and some are concentrated. It is the most space conserving method, since dried food shrinks and takes up less space. Decide if you LIKE something dehydrated, I'm still trying to figure out how to cook with it later. Canning requires more heat and heating destroys some vitamins. But it keeps without electricity. Meh, so a variety of preservation methods may be the answer to getting off season nutrition. I have never used the vacuum sealing devices. Jars last a long time, but you have to store them when not in use. You can freeze stuff until you get around to canning. I have done that with tomatoes. I think you have to figure out what is right for you.

I do the same as okoutdoorsman, using freezing, canning and dehydrating to preserve a lot of our crops, and I also root cellar all the suitable crops. My potatoes lasted until January just stored in the house in the pantry that is underneath the first floor stairway. Onions did not last as long as usual this year because they were grown in such wet conditions, but in a good year they can last until January or February before they start sprouting.I do put the potatoes way back at the back of the panty which is darker than the area closer to the pantry door. Sometimes I store potatoes, onions, garlic, winter squash, etc. in the tornado shelter.

Much depends on the space you have available. We have three deep freezes---one indoors and two out in our oversized garage. All three are full by the end of the growing season, and then as we eat up the food, we empty them out one by one. Once a freezer is empty, we unplug it and leave it unplugged until we need to use it again. We are far enough south that power outages are incredibly rare. I can only think of 1 or 2 times since we moved here in 1999 when our power has been out for longer than 2 hours, and each time it wasn't out for much more than 2 hours. However, we do have a generator and could run the freezers off of it if we had to. If you are in an area with frequent power outages, you might prefer canning to freezing.

To can, you need to have not only a canner, but a canner that is suitable for whatever you're going to process, i.e. a boiling water bath canner for high-acid foods and a pressure canner for low acid foods.

In terms of storage, you'll need storage space not only for your canned food products but also for all the canning equipment, empty jars, extra lids, rings, etc. The one thing I think is missing in our house is a food preserver's pantry/store room and one of these days I plan for us to build one.

As it is now, even with a large pantry that extends the full space beneath the staircase, I struggle to find a place to store all the canning equipment and all the jars of home-canned room.

At various times, both canning supplies and canned foods have taken over the downstairs coat closet, the closets in the spare bedrooms, etc. Sometimes, because I make over 200 jars of salsa each year (much of it to give away as gifts), we have underbed storage boxes with snap-on lids that are filled with jars of salsa stored under the beds. After we give away all that "extra" salsa at Christmas time, I move all the rapidly empty canning jars from the kitchen to the underbed storage boxes and then, for a few months, my pantry is fairly well under control again for a while.

You also have to consider how you like to eat your food. Let's use green beans as an example. Some people prefer the texture of frozen green beans, some prefer canned, and some don't care either way. In my family, we all hate the texture of canned beans and prefer the texture of frozen beans, so I freeze all our beans, except the ones canned as Dilly Beans. Another example is tomatoes. We can a lot of them, but we freeze others to use in cooking, and I dehydrate a lot of them. Now, I like dehydrated tomatoes, but Tim and Chris don't. So, if I am making soup just for me, I can throw handfuls of dehydrated tomatoes into it and be perfectly happy with them, while my husband and son don't care for the dehydrated tomatoes, even once they are rehydrated in soup. With everything I preserve, I choose the method that works best for the way we like to eat.

With regards to the stove and the use of canners, it is important to note that some manufacturers explicitly state that your warranty is voided if you damage your stove top with a canner (generally this is in reference to the very heavy pressure canners, not the more lightweight kettles or pots used as boiling water bath canners). There's also potential safety issues that have to do with the way stoves like yours and mine cycle in and out of heat while canning. It is more of an issue with the longer canning times required for pressure canning than with the shorter times required for boiling water bath canning. I do use my stove for boiling water bath canning, but not for pressure canning. There are alternative methods to employ if you cannot use your stovetop and you can find them discussed on the Harvest Forum. They include the use of electric turkey fryers, stand-alone burners and grills as the heat source for canning. My stove is a Bosch and our warranty explicitly states that it is voided if we use a canner on our stove. I use one anyway for boiling water bath canning and never have had a problem.

I have no experience with electric canners.

Ditto the advice on food sealing systems. We don't use our Food Saver for very many cycles at once, so I am happy with it. I can see where it would get overheated if you were doing a lot at one time. On any given day that I harvest tomatoes, I tend to set some aside for fresh eating and to give to friends, and then I can and dehydrate some. I only freeze them when I have too many to can, eat and give away quickly.

My dream item is one of the new home-sized freeze-drying machines that would let us freeze-dry our harvest. The ones on the market now (and they are fairly new these last few years) have not reached a price point I feel comfortable with, but if they ever do drop to a somewhat more reasonable price that I'm willing to pay, I'd get one in a heartbeat.

Oh, and about dehydrating. If you are going to do that, that's one more piece of equipment to store. I used to use a countertop dehydrator with trays. When I wasn't using it, I stored it on top of the deep-freeze (largely because I didn't have anyplace else to put it). When we bought our Bosch stove a few years ago, it came with a convection oven that has a "dehydrate" mode. Now that I can dehydrate using my oven, I got rid of my countertop dehydrator which freed up a little more storage space. You must be careful to dehydrate your food down to the recommended moisture level. If you leave too much moisture in it, it can mold if stored at room tempearture.

My advice about the vacuum sealers is influenced by the fact that I do home butcher on top of preserving garden veggies. It's very possible a more moderately priced unit would last several years for the most gardeners.

One thing I haven't noticed being mentioned is, for items that will utilized in a relatively short time frame, ZipLoc freezer bags are great. Items that can be packed with minimal air in the package will keep quite a while. Normally 6-12 months, but I've had great success with keeping a lot of stuff for 2-3 years. The critical thing is getting the air out and packing them in the freezer so they don't get damaged.

I have a batch of elk chili in the crockpot that I just added some Hatch green chilies to. The chilies have been in the freezer at least two years and still tasted fresh.

That brings up another point. There are several things that are not recommended for canning, because of safety concerns. At least not using a water bath. Pressure canning can destroy texture and flavor. Dehydrating can be an iffey proposition for some. So, we come back to storing them in the freezer.

The freeze dry machine is on my want list! Just can't justify the expense! 4-5K for the units I was looking at.

And I want a root cellar. Unfortunately my property really doesn't have a good place to put one. I am looking at insulating and covering the storm cellar in an effort to control temps. It still be difficult to have more than one zone with the current design.

We are still eating canned potatoes. The frozen potatoes are all gone.

We washed the Irish potatoes outside with veggie brushes, quartered them, blanched them and froze them in regular freezer bags. Worked great; tasted great. Will do it again this year. I plan to freeze about 100 pounds just for me and my closest friends.

Our experiment with canning french fry shaped potatoes worked very well. I made oven fries all Winter. YUM!

We have had great success with freezing and I enjoy the end result. Thankfully, we've never had a power outage that lasted long enough to ruin our frozen foods. Keep the freezer closed and it will keep things cool quite a long time.

Lately l've been experimenting with fermenting foods for long-term storage. Sauerkraut is one easy example but there are lots of things that will keep for months if properly fermented. Most last longest if stored in a refrigerator. We have a spare fridge in the garage primarily used for fermented beverages of the Coors kind, but also a good place for storing pickles and such.

I do a few fermented pickles and on occasion sauerkraut. Unfortunately my wife is not a huge fan of pickled foods, so I typically try not to do any more than I know I'll eat. The extra fridge would help tremendously. Without one I'm starting to toss the pickles after about 3 months. Not a soggy pickle fan.

Saurkraut seems to hold up a little longer.

I do use a lot of Ziplock freezer bags. I buy them in bulk at CostCo. During the food preservation season, my pantry is full of freezer ziplocks in various sizes. My son rolls his eyes when I unload the car after going to CostCo and am carrying in all those Ziplock bags, but we run through all those freezer ziplocks amazingly quickly.

I do ferment sauerkraut and sometimes pickles, and occasionally fermented pepper sauce. This winter I've been reading Sandor Katz' book "The Art of Fermentation", which is incredibly detailed (498 pages) and just boggles my brain. He can tell you how to ferment all kinds of food I never thought of in terms of fermentation. It is a brilliant book but what I really need is a little beginner's guide to simple things that are just slightly more complicated than fermented pickles or sauerkraut. I do confess that the first time I made sauerkraut I couldn't believe how easy it was and how good it tasted. It seemed too simple to be true. I want to ferment more types of things, but I just get so overwhelmed with all the food preservation and garden maintenance in summer that I can't carve out time to try something new.

Our extra fridge in the garage is also often filled with beverages of all kinds---beer for the guys and water and Gatorade for all of us, but I do cram a lot of fruits and veggies in there in summer. It is a great "holding" place for the morning's harvest until I can get around to processing it in the afternoon or evening. We also bought a larger fridge for the kitchen the last time we needed a new fridge because I wanted more space for more veggies. When you open a refigerator door and lumpy, bumpy overfilled bags of fresh produce start falling out and landing on your toes, that's a sign that it is time to stop harvesting and speed up the processing. I love doing it though, even though it can get exhausting. What I love most is how we just completely skip the produce section at the grocery store for much of the year. I also love knowing how our food was grown and processed, and so far we haven't ever had any food-related illnesses like you sometimes get with purchased produce. We try to eat in season as much as possible, but I always put up the excess so we can enjoy the produce when it is out of season too.

Our first garage fridge was just a $50 Craig's List refrigerator that our son bought for the garage. It worked for several years and served its purpose well. When it started going out, we bought a brand new fridge for the kitchen and moved the former kitchen fridge to the garage. I love, love, love having both of them. Oh, and for a while we had two dorm fridges left over from our son's college years. They also came in handy for a small bit of extra refrigerated storage.

I like to can and freeze. This year I am going to be dehydrating a lot. And I have a new foodsaver to try out. And I can not wait. I didn't get as much put up last year with remodeling packing and moving. I hope to do a lot this year.

I may try the campstove since canning in a camper does not sound like as much fun.

And I am definately going to can and freeze potatoes for my son. His went bad fast this year in storage.

We all seem to be on the same wave length this year with our interest in food preservation and I just got a new book called, "Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning", which is a French book that has been translated into English. I don't know how much I will use it but it is interesting to read. I probably will not ferment pickles because I have become addicted to the ease of Mrs Wages mixes. It has been years since I have made sauerkraut, but I might try that again.

I have a side-by-side refrigerator (which I hate), another refrigerator in the bunk house, and a dorm fridge in the storm shelter. Then I have a large freezer, and a small chest freezer. We live in an area that is prone to electrical black outs and after an extended one, we knew we had to always have a generator.

I only grow enough potatoes that I can use before they spoil because I don't have a place to store them long term. I can and freeze, but don't dehydrate many things. My son has a really good apple tree and I sometimes dehydrate a few apples, but mostly I can them into apples for cooking, applesauce, or apple butter. I like to have enough onions to take me well into the winter, and sometimes I chop and freeze the smaller ones, but I use a lot in salsa most years.

I started gardening just to have fresh nutritious food, but soon found I could easily grow much more than we could eat fresh. Since I love to grow it, I had to come up with ways to make it last longer. We have been working in the garden the past two days, and I was just taking a break for lunch. Since my son, DIL, and 4 of their children have been working with me, we will probably have the garden mostly ready after today, except for adding some compost which we plan to do next week. I know that Delaware County is far from being finished with winter, but it is almost onion planting time, and time to get seeds started for transplanted crops. I am ready for Spring.

Thank you so much everyone for your thoughtful replies. I can see I am going to need to just suck it up and get a burner for canning and learn to can and freeze. I love the idea of freezing and I have a deep freeze and even with just cleaning, chopping and throwing it in zip locks it fills up the freezer. My herbs get dried. I have a laundry hanging rack that I tie herbs to after I bundled them up and I let them hang and dry. I feel canning would give me more flexibility, particularly with tomatoes. Right now when I grow them I either eat them or give them away and none are saved. Which is a shame, really, because I am stuck buying tomatoes all winter. YUCK! Store bought tomatoes are not the same as we all know. I think canning would be alot of fun, but I do worry about doing it right. :)

ezzirah,

We give free pressure canning (low acid foods) classes a few times each year. I like my All American canner.

https://www.facebook.com/visionfarms/

Johnny

Guthrie, Oklahoma

Dawn

i had to laugh -turning into our grandmothers seems to be normal in the gardening lovers circles! Now, if I start stirring up batches of lye soap in a big, black kettle, I will have gone over the edge! Lol My little German grandmother came to Oklahoma in 1900 from Russia, and canned everything, including meats, made her own noodles, lye soap, clothes, quilts, rugs, on and on. I must stand amazed at our grandparents' accomplishments. I NEED to be like them!

I guess my biggest concern is canning safety. I am so scared I am going to give myself botulism, that I don't can. Is there anyway to tell when you open a jar that it has not been canned right? Does it smell? or have ick on it?

Thank you Johnny! I will friend you on FB and look for an announcement for your classes!

Having access to someone with canning experience is priceless when it comes to learning how to can. It's likely your local county extension offers classes.

I haven't utilized to much, but Houzz has a section on food preservation.

It's very possible to learn on your own, but it can be a little intimidating. I've linked what I consider to be the best online source of information.

http://nchfp.uga.edu

I second everything okoutdoorsman said. You should use only trusted canning sources for your canning info because there's tons of misinformation out there on the internet, on people's blogs, forums, etc. The National Center for Home Food Preservation is THE authority on food preservation in the USA, and you should always do things the way they say. Lots of people sort of resist doing things the NCHFP way and want to can things the way that "mama" or "grandma" did, but the NCHFP constantly researches and improves methods, and the methods and recipes used by our parents, grandparents or grandparents when then preserved food likely have been replaced by safer methods. You also can trust the Ball Blue Book, found on the canning aisle at stores like Wal-Mart. It updates every few years. I haven't saved all my old copies because once a new BBB comes out, its methods and recipes are the latest and older books may contain outdated methods no longer in use.

There are many people over at the Harvest Forum who are very experienced and very well-trained food preservers, including some who are Master Food Preservers and some who actually teach food preservation classes in their respective locations. You can learn a lot from reading at the Harvest Forum.

The most important thing about canning is and always will be safety. Botulism is invisible. You won't see it, you can't taste it or smell it, etc. The way that you "know" your canned food is not contaminated with botulism is that you scrupulously follow each and every safety procedure every time, never deviate from using only safety-approved canning recipes, and always carefully inspect jars to make sure they sealed. Then, store the canned food properly (50-70 degrees is best) and always check jars before you open them to make sure the seal on the jar didn't break during storage. Also watch for any signs of mold inside a jar that might indicate something went horribly wrong either during the canning process or afterwards.

Most botulism cases in home canned food occur because a person canned a vegetable the wrong way---for example, using a boiling water bath canner to can green beans when they should instead have used a pressure canner. And, please be sure that before you even buy a pressure canner, you understand that pressure cookers are not necessarily pressure canners and be sure you buy a pressure canner, not a pressure cooker. That's another common mistake.

If you are extremely nervous, take a canning class offered in your community, or at the very least, do the self-paced classes on the website of the NCHFP. Then, start slowly with simple things that require only boiling water bath canning. (I did it backwards, since I grew up in a canning family, and the first things I canned on my own were pressure canned, but I think as a total newbie it is easier to start with the boiling water bath.) Once you've canned simple boiling water bath recipes (pickles, tomato sauce, some canned fruits, jellies, jams, etc.) and feel confident in what you're doing, then you can buy a pressure canner and tackle that method if you want to.

I am not all that old (turning 57 this year) and I can tell you than canning methods used now are a lot more strict (and safe) than the way we canned things in the 1960s and probably the 1970s. If my grandmother still were alive, I believe she'd confirm that current canning methods are quite different now than when she was a young woman in the 1920s and 1930s. Some people cling to old family recipes and do things in a way that no longer is considered safe, and that is like playing Russian roulette with your life and with the life of everyone who eats anything you can. Please always follow the current procedures and only use safety-approved recipes. If you do, you really have nothing to fear from your own home-canned food. The approved methods are designed to give you a safe product every time, so as long as you follow them, you shouldn't have unsafe food. Canning is different from cooking in the sense that you cannot add anything else to a canning recipe (unless the recipe itself lists safety-approved substitutions) ever because anything you change can affect the pH of the product and thereby its safety or can affect the density of the produce and thereby its safety.

Please note that pressure canning involves keeping the jars in the canner for a longer time frame than you use with most boiling water bath canning recipes, so it does require more of a time investment. Also, due to the long length of time you have to leave some veggies in the pressure canner, there may be changes in some food products' texture that you may not like. If you find that to be true, then freezing or dehydrating those particular food items might be a method you choose to use instead.

It will take time and experimentation to learn what you prefer to eat---my family likes the texture of frozen green beans better than canned green beans, so I don't can green beans at all---I freeze them all. (Well, except for dilly beans, but they are a pickled bean product and not strictly a canned bean product like you'd get from a can at the grocery store.) With some items, you can use multiple food preservation methods depending on how you will use the finished product. For example, when you have a bumper peach harvest, you might make peach jam, peach jelly, canned peaches and frozen peaches. You might even dehydrate some. Preserving a specific type of food item in several ways leaves you lots more options for how you can use the preserved food throughout the year.

Please don't be afraid of food preservation. As long as you learn the proper methods, use them religiously, don't deviate from safe canning and safe food preservation and safe food storage procedures, you'll be fine. Just start small and simple and build from there. Advance to harder, more complicated things as your confidence builds. There is nothing better than being able to put up a huge amount of food from your own harvest (or, for things you don't or can't grow, from purchased items) to eat throughout the coming months.

When Dawn says follow it exactly, it means even if it seems wrong. I made pickle relish year before last that I thought had too much liquid in it. The Harvest forum explained to me it needed the extra liquid to heat properly. They said to drain some off when the jar was opened. You will learn a great deal just by reading through the posts over there.

I agree with Dawn and Amy above, but would like to say one more thing. As Dawn told you, start simple with things you can do in a boiling water bath and that may be all you ever want to do. I have a pressure canner, but rarely use it. I did over 200 jars last year and never took the pressure canner out of the box. We like pickles, jams and jellies, butters, and especially salsa. It doesn't break my heart to open a can of tomatoes or tomato sauce to use in a recipe, but I like my salsa better than any I can buy, so that is what I use my tomatoes for after we have eaten all of the fresh ones we can handle. Last year I washed, and froze a few whole tomatoes in gallon ziplocks. A couple of weeks ago, I needed the freezer space and most of those tomatoes became homemade tomato soup, also better than what I can buy. I find that condiments, or those little extra things add to a meal. When I look at the cost of those 'special' things, they always seem to be expensive in the grocery store. Compare the cost of salsa to a can of tomatoes for instance, and decide which things will be best to spend your time doing and using you home grown produce for.

My point is this: A lot of people have invested in a pressure canner that rarely (or never) gets used. Save your money for now and just do the things you can do without a pressure canner, or find a friend that has one and do a batch or two with her to make sure that is what you want to do.

soonergrandmom,

I'd like to see one or two pressure canners in every neighborhood. Too many folks don't have a clue how to feed themselves.

Johnny

In my neighborhood you would only see one or two gardens. LOL

I've gone back and read this topic 3 or 4 times and I keep coming back to the last two posts. Thought I'd share a couple of thoughts.

How great would it be to be able to go into those neighborhoods and see gardens in every yard? I'm betting there would be at least 1-2 pressure canners in every neighborhood as a result! It's likely there would be 1-2 in most of the homes.

Since none of that will ever happen, I would at least like to see more community gardens. Who knows, maybe that could expand into community food preservation groups?

There are several garden plots in my neighborhood, but they don't always get planted. One is very small and usually gets planted but the owners are only here part of the time. She says that this little garden produces more with no care, than the one at their main home. Another neighbor plants every year, but I think they mostly can green beans and eat fresh okra, then kind of let it go. His wife doesn't like tomatoes, so they don't plant much variety. There was once a nice garden down the street, but I think those people moved. Most of my neighbors would rather be fishing than gardening, but I see a few tomato plants in flower beds an such.

Just outside my neighborhood a man planted a nice big garden last year and it was beautiful. I had never met them, but was impressed with his garden. A short time later I learned that he had died while out picking blackberries.

Grove is a nice place to garden. Most years we have adequate rainfall with very little additional water required. I can hardly wait for Spring to arrive.

okoutdrsman,

If you come across a neighborhood that wants a garden, please let me know. Vision Farms creates (or expands) community, neighborhood or church gardens for free. However, we are limited to 70 miles distance from Guthrie, OK.

Johnny

soonergrandmom,

I hope to start my last trip from my garden. Also, I told my Son to put my ashes in a garden.

Johnny

Bethel Acres is within that distance. But, being a rural community, I'm not sure how well it would go over? With Shawnee and Tecumseh being close by, there may be some opportunity for something like this. I'll put out some feelers and see if there is any interest.

Hopefully we will get a chance to discuss this subject, this weekend.

We moved into an area where almost everyone but us had lived here their entire lives and were in their 70s and 80s and still gardened. Over the years, most of those folks have passed away, and one by one, the gardens have faded away. Sometimes the surviving spouse or kids kept the garden going for another year or two, but usually once the devoted gardener is gone, the garden is gone as well. It kind of breaks my heart---not only do I miss those specific people, but I miss seeing their beautiful and productive gardens. I am happy to report, though, that my friend, Fred, is still gardening and ranching at 93.5 years of age, and his son, who is my age, helps him now with the garden tasks.

I think there's worse ways on this earth to die than to just suddenly drop dead in the garden. If that happens to me, I hope the last thing I ate was a juicy tomato right off the vine!

Dawn,

I hope you get your wish.

Johnny