It’s been so long for me because my husband always said that the farmer’s wife had to put the food on the table. So, I quit gardening and went out and got a job and bought the food. Lazy, wasn’t I?

The real value to me is in making stock, if I had to pick out just one thing. Store-bought stock is a joke – it should be against the law to call it stock. USDA guidelines require only the equivalent of 1 oz of protein to approx. 1 gal. of water. And that’s for beef stock. Chicken stock, for some “strange” reason is not bound to those guidelines. So, where does that rich meaty flavor come from? Hmmmm….

A well-made bone broth has more nutrition and health benefits than anything you can buy in the store. I freeze some, but like to can most of it. Half-pint jars are perfect for taking to work, or for a quick pick-me-up at home. Like nothing you can buy at the store. And, with decent stock on the shelf, you only have to add bits and pieces of leftover meat/veggies/starch and there’s dinner.

I refuse to eat canned chili after reading in Consumer Reports some years back that it had the highest levels of “allowable filth” of any canned food they tested. (Rodent hair, mouse droppings, bug feet, etc.) Most all mass produced food has some. With my own chili, it’s made to my standards and tastes, as are other things I can.

As pointed out by others, there is a significant savings if you get your supplies frugally. For me, the health benefits are key. As my grandfather used to say, “You can spend it on food, or you can spend it on medicine.”

Off my soapbox .

Also it wasn’t important to me living in Southern CA but now that I’m in the northeast i can’t get good produce year-round. Tomatoes aren’t even red!

I can pints of turkey from fresh turkeys bought at 29 Cents a lb. the day after Thanksgiving, and other meats when I get them at really good prices. They are a convenience in making various casseroles, since they’re ready to go without defrosting, and I like the fact that I have a supply of meat that is not dependent on an uninterrupted power supply.

Another option is to get reusable lids, from Tattler. They are a two piece lid, a rubber ring and a plastic cap which are used with a regular metal ring. The initial cost is more that a one time use ring, but over time they are a great savings, and you never have to worry about running low. The Tattler lids are also BPA free, whereas the one time lids are not.

I’d also be careful canning pumpkin in a water bath, the USDA doesn’t recommend that since the pumpkin is so thick and you may not process all the way through.

My mom taught me how to can. I never *needed* the skill growing up. Dad had a great job and I never, ever felt like we had a need to be frugal.

However, my hubby and I have weathered lay-offs TWICE in our lives and we would not have fared so well had my mom not taught me those frugal skills. She learned them because she was a kid in the depression era. A way of life. I didn’t need them in my teen years, but I sure needed them in my newlywed, then raising my children stage of life.

My children all know how to be frugal. They know how to garden, can, freeze, clip coupons, shop wisely, make clothes, barter… I pray that they won’t NEED those skills, but I sleep well at night knowing they HAVE those skills.

And just a side note — the cost of canning is completely irrelevant to me when I consider the Saturday mornings spent with my little army of helpers beside me. That time was PRICELESS.

Even though I know it isn’t financially worth it, I don’t really like spaghetti, and it wasn’t much fun for me to can, I will still do it again when he gives me the next batch. I just can’t stand to see the tomatoes go to waste (which is what would happen if I didn’t preserve them, he’d just feed them to his chickens… and these are beautiful heirloom tomatoes! I shudder to even blend them up and can them, I can’t take the thought of wasting them altogether.)

Thanks for the tips :) I wish the matriarchs in my life had these skills to teach me.

1) I feel I am developing a skill that I will use even more later when I am in a position to grow more of my own food.

2) I place a high value on making my own food. I get a lot of pleasure from spreading my homemade strawberry-rhubarb jam on my morning toast.

3) I enjoy having foods made exactly as I like them (e.g. applesauce that has the perfect amount of spice and sugar) or that are simply unavailable in the store (e.g. unusual flavours of jam).

4) I highly value eating locally grown food. I cannot buy locally grown frozen strawberries in the winter (even if I extend “local” to mean “all of Canada”). I cannot buy canned peaches that are not from another country either.

5) Using my pressure canner, I can make actual prepared foods as opposed to just ingredients. I can make many jars of soup or stew, for example. This is a great time saver throughout the year. (Note: I can them rather than freeze because I do not have a deep freezer due to lack of space. Also they will not be affected by power outages.)

Since I actually do enjoy canning, I’m not going to argue with her experience.

Even if I didn’t grow my own produce, and I don’t grow all of it, the flavor and knowing exactly what is in it, plus no BPA in glass jars is totally worth it.

Canning does take time, but I have time being a stay at home mom, and I don’t have money. So canning is worth my time.

LIke Carole, I have a pressure canner which also can be used to water bath can, and its 23qt volume makes a great big stock pot for big batches of soup or boiling corn. I do have a jar lifter, which I bought for $3. Other than that anything I have for canning, like a large mouth funnel, I use for other things in the kitchen so they really aren’t specialty items.

And I agree with Carrie and Becky, home made jam and grape juice have ruined my palate for the better. I can’t even swallow the store bought stuff. Ick!

I love processing food (pickles, jam, dehydrating, freezing) but I’m not that wild about gardening. I live in a rural area with lots of passionate and experienced gardeners.

Next year, I’m considering offering to process my friends’ produce for them, for a cut of the harvest. If they drop off 40 lbs of tomatoes and a box of jars, I could give them back 30 lbs worth of sauce in their own jars, and keep 10 lbs for myself in my jars (or whatever ratio works for both of us).

Has anybody here done anything like that?

Making jam & jelly is really cost-effective if you have a free source of fruit. One year we found an incredible blackberry patch and I made three gallons of blackberry and apple-blackberry jam and jelly (in pint and half-pint jars). Not only did it make great gifts, but my husband ate everything we kept within a year. Considering he goes through at least one jar of jam per week, that saved us a lot of money and the jam was delicious. He’ll happily eat the cheap kind made with high-fructose corn syrup (as long as it isn’t grape), but when I’m shopping, I can’t bring myself to feed that stuff to my dear husband, so I tend to buy the $5/jar jams for him. Making jam from foraged fruit instead(typically stretched with apples from our own trees) is much less expensive and the quality is at least as high.

However, I can’t believe you didn’t even mention the time! I got 50 lbs of tomatoes from my dad’s garden over the weekend. It took 10 hours of work (active, stir-the-pot-every-few-minutes kind of work) to make 16 pints of spaghetti sauce. I can buy a pint of sauce for $1 in the store – making my hourly wage $1.44 without factoring in the prorated cost of the jars and bands. If I use my real hourly wage (take home pay after work-related expenses), those pints cost me $13.85 each. Yes, my sauce is much better than store bought, but not 13 times better.