Canning From The Garden – How We Stock Our Home-Grown Grocery Store
Canning is a major priority when it comes to meeting our food goals
If you walk into our kitchen anytime between the summer months of July and August – chances are you will hear the rolling boil sounds of the water bath canner, the hum of the food saver bags being sealed, or the woosh-woosh of a pressure canner in action. To us – it’s music to our ears – because they represent the stocking of our home-grown grocery store.
Something is always being canned in the kitchen this time of year.
Between what we consume fresh and preserve from the garden and farm – we supply a large majority of our home food needs throughout the year.
For the most part – our grocery store visits are now concentrated on only the outer perimeter aisles…fresh fruit (what we can’t or do not grow yet), milk, orange juice and meats.
What we grow fresh, can, freeze and make lets us stay clear of the “middle aisles” of a grocery store – where most everything is packaged and loaded with all types of preservatives. It’s great to know at any time of the year – we can head to our canning pantry for our own pasta sauce, green beans, corn, ketchup, salsa, picante, pickles, relish, ketchup, tomato juice, jams and more.
The canning pantry pictured last fall – after filling from the garden
Although it’s certainly true that growing and preserving your own food can save big money on grocery bills – our real goal was to know exactly where our food came from and what was in it. Or maybe I should say to know what’s not in it – like sprays, pesticides, artificial fertilizers – and preservatives!
The entire process from planning our garden (see: 2014 Garden Plan) – to creating the list (we included our preserving need’s list at the bottom of the post), all become one integrated process.
It’s actually a simple process. The key for us is to create a list of what we like most and what we use throughout the year – and making sure to plan the garden and subsequent harvests so that we can meet our “food preserving” goals.
We know that we enjoy a lot of tomatoes, green beans,onions, peppers and garlic on many dishes we make throughout the year – so we simply calculate out what we use of each on average in a given week/month and year – and make sure we can grow accordingly.
There are a lot of empty jars on the canning pantry shelves this time of year needing filled back up!
Just as important – before we head full-bore into preserving season – we do a thorough inventory of our Canning Cupboard and Freezer to use up what we have left – and to adjust what we will need to preserve to fill it back up.
Each season, we get a little better at knowing how much produce we will need to get us through the year, and fine tune the plan. For this season, we have begun to can a lot more of the items we use sparingly (relish, hot pepper rings, diced tomatoes) in more 1/2 pint jars so that we can have just the right amount on hand when needed – and reduce wsate,
The key is to get harvest like this to last throughout the year!
On that note – when we freeze, we have learned to make things in individual and family size portions to make the best use of space and reduce waste. One of our favorites to now make are stir-fry packets that already have all of the vegetables cut and ready to go for a single meal or a family meal. It makes creating fast dinners a breeze!
Happy Gardening and Canning! – Jim and Mary
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Our Canning / Preserving List
Tomato Juice : 60 quarts
Salsa : 24 Pints
Picante Salsa : 24 pints
Hot Pepper Mustard : 30 pints
Pasta Sauce : 26 Quarts
Green Beans : 24 pints
Pizza Sauce : 6 pints
Hot and Spicy Ketchup : 6 pints
Strawberry-Honey Jam – 6 pints
Blackberry-Honey Jam – 4 pints
Apple Butter – 6 pints
Pickles – 12 to 16 pints of assorted varieties
A few jars each of jalapeno rings, banana pepper rings, hot pepper flakes, cowboy candy, strawberry-lemonade concentrate, cayenne pepper powder, chili powder and taco seasoning.
Freezer:
Chili – 12 to 24 quarts (we freeze them into quart bricks)
Vegetable soup – 12 to 24 quarts
Whole peppers for stuffing,
Jalapeno, Cajun Belle and Mini Belle peppers for appetizers
Corn – 24 frozen quart bags
Stir Fry Packets – 24 packets of onions, peppers, and sugar snap peas for stir fry
Old World Garden Farms 
Do you have recipes for ketchup and salsa’s
we sure do – if you click the canning tab on the front page of the site it will take you to all of them
I would love to have the dimensions and instructions on how to build the canning pantry from pallets.
Carmen – we actually created plans on Etsy after so many asked – you can get them here : https://www.etsy.com/shop/OWGardenVintage
Mary, how do you freeze all that food and not have it taste like freezer after just a few months? And when I try to freeze onions or peppers for soup and stew, then my whole freezer smells like them and after a while everything else does too. Do the Sealers help with this instead of using ziplock baggies?
I would love to know how you freeze jalapeno peppers, and then how you use them as appetizers after they thaw, we enjoy jalapeno poppers throughout the year. It would be nice to be able to save part of my harvest for that.
I am looking for a recipe to make pickles with cucumbers that got to old on the vine I have seen this recipe somewhere and can’t seem to find it. I was wondering if you might have a good recipe that you might share with us
Thank you for the list!!! I’ve not been clever enough to know what I need to plant so I just plant what looks good then can everything. Too much tomato juice and not enough green beans this year. The deer at all the beans! 🙂
Blackberry-Honey Jam, my that sounds good! Wonderful tips, thank you for sharing. My goal is also to can enough for a year, it is an art to be sure (and a work in progress for me).
I love your idea for freezing the stir fry packets, it’s really smart!!! How do they thaw out, are the veggies mushy?
This is so impressive! We are working on getting our garden to produce enough for a whole year and each year it gets better and better. I loved seeing all you have canned so far!
It is unnecessary to leave the rings on cooled jars after processing.
Joseph – you are correct, however, for us – it is easier just to store them on it and not have to find another place to keep rings. 🙂
In our house you more apt to hear the humming sound of a fan in our dehydrator than any of the other sounds. Once in awhile you might hear the rolling boil sounds of the water bath canner or the hum of the food saver bags being sealed. Since I’m retired and my wife isn’t it’s left to me to do the food preservation from our gardens. I’d rather dehydrate everything then mess up the recipes that canning requires. Though I do make a mean salsa.
Someday I hope to get a pressure canner for the fruit (tomatoes) and such. Though dehydrated tomatoes still work in soups and stews pretty good.
I notice a lot of tomato juice but no tomatoes. Was that an oops? I freeze tomatoes for a better fresh tomato taste. Remove skins & core, put a colander over a large bowl, cut tomatoes up into colander, drain well (you can drink the juice in the bowl or use it in something else), pack the tomatoes into 1 pint freezer containers or zipper bags & freeze. Easy peasy & the tomatoes taste so much better than canned. Not nearly as much water either. They keep well in the freezer for a really long tome too as long as you get all of the air out of the zipper bag or vacuum seal the blocks from plastic freezer containers once they’re frozen solid.
I would like to have your receipe for hot banana peppers.
Thanks Sharon Carter
This is wonderful! I love the idea for the stir fry packets in the freezer!
Thank you so much for your motivational messages weekly. There are so many daily chores to do and reading your inspiring words help to keep us on the right track. Thank you again! Debbie
What kind of pressure cooker and canner do you use? I am in the planning stage to start on a similar path. Can you tell us more about your how you went about this initially.
Your blog is very inspiring.
Lisse – we use a presto pressure canner and it has been really good for us. For water bathing we use a standard large stock pot. We started out initially with canning our own juice from tomatoes and just worked up form there. We were fortunate to have both of our families can when we grew up – and they taught us a lot!
Do you have recipes on how to preserve all of the items on your canning/preserving list?
We sure do – you can find them on our canning link or on our 30 recipes to self sufficiency tab found here : http://oldworldgardenfarms.com/30-recipes-to-self-sufficiency/
I would like to make stir fry bags. Do you blanch the veggies before you freeze them?
Our standard stir fry packets we just slice and freeze and they have always tasted fresh. However we do blanch some other veggies like cauliflower before freezing.
If you added carrots to your stir fry, would you blanch them?
You guys are inspiring!!!!!
Thank you so much – we really enjoy what we do and so happy to share the info with others that like to do the same
Just out of curiosity, do you package your frozen stir fry blend into quart or pint bags?
With the Food Saver – we can adjust to any size -but for the most part, they are more pint sized.
This is so inspiring. I am making a real effort to can, freeze, and preserve as much as I can this year and growing many more things in our now ever-expanding garden. Planning ahead and knowing exactly what we’ll need seems overwhelming at this point, but in the long run I know it will benefit the entire process. Thank you so much for sharing. I really enjoy all of your posts. They are always full of great advise and inspiration.