Hi Carbon04

You can can almost anything, there are a few exceptions. For low acid foods (beans, meat, vegetables etc) you'll need a pressure canner (not a pressure cooker) and for high acid foods (jams, jellies, tomatoes etc) you can use a water bath pot. If you're going to start canning please get a new copy of the Bernardin Guide to Home Preserving, I see it at Walmart & Cdn Tire all the time, around $10 I think. It will give you instructions on how to can foods properly and minimize the risk of the food going bad. Don't use an older book or recipes, some of the ones from the 50's aren't food safe. www.homecanning.com is the Bernardin website and is a good place to start. Ideally canned food should be used within a year for optimal nutrition and looks however I've used canned green beans that were 3 years old and they were fine however they had faded in colour a little bit even though they had been stored in the dark. Before opening canned food I always check that the seal has held, no bulging lid and that it looks & smells ok. What are you thinking of canning?

about to install a large hydroponics/ aquaponics system....Im planning on over a hundred pepper plants alone (the kids eat them like apples and their bloody expensive...my four year old will eat 5 - 6 in one sitting...at $1.69 a pop)...the ones they don't eat I'll use for stir fry, soups etc...however they go bad quick...so I was intending to freeze, but canning sounds like a better option.

I would try canning some peppers and see if my kids would eat them. I've run into people who won't eat canned peaches because the texture changes and with sweet peppers it will go from a crisp vegetable to soggy. Best to know now if the kid who eats 5 or 6 fresh peppers won't touch a canned one if their life depended on it. When I buy new things at the grocery store I'll only buy a couple and see if it will get eaten. No point having foods no one likes. You could also dehydrate the peppers if you're using them for soups & stews.

about to install a large hydroponics/ aquaponics system....Im planning on over a hundred pepper plants alone (the kids eat them like apples and their bloody expensive...my four year old will eat 5 - 6 in one sitting...at $1.69 a pop)...the ones they don't eat I'll use for stir fry, soups etc...however they go bad quick...so I was intending to freeze, but canning sounds like a better option.

If you have a dehydrator....use the mats rather than the mesh liners and make half apple , half pepper fruit leather...I bet the kids would enjoy that.

We have a charcoal BBQ/Smoker so hubby wants to try smoking peppers for storage this year.

I tend to either pickle them, make hot pepper jelly and can it, or slice and freeze them as they don't need blanching. With pickling you only have to hot water bath can them.

I am a canning diva! I can everything I can get my hands on!
All year, a deal is only a deal if you can make it work and sometimes you can find a wicked one on veggies even in the dead of (a fairly mild) winter!
I will buy a 50 pound bag of potatoes (well we split it between 2 families so 25 pounds) I cube and can half of them for quick boiled potatoes on busy nights (I literally just have to heat them up an a pot kind of steaming them) and the other half I cut, blanch, dry and freeze on cookie trays for homemade frozen fries. Once frozen I toss what was on the tray into a freezer bag. To cook, I take out the bag, pour 2 tbsp of olive oil into the freezer bag, add some seasonings, reseal it and shake it up. I cook em at 400 for about 20-25 minutes and my kids don't notice the difference between them and the "super fries".

I make veggie soup starter and can it into one quart jars and then I just have to add whatever I want to make it into something awesome! I take carrots, parsnip, celery, onions, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes and some water. I boil it all together (only adding a 1/2 teaspoon of salt to the whole pot but lots of pepper and a bay leaf is added to each jar for seasoning). I make a huge pot, 3 gallons and then pour it into jars and put it in the pressure canner (def. worth the money for that, I was lucky and found mine at a second hand store a couple of years ago!)
So when I make soup or the power goes out we have a beautiful soup ready to eat and full of vitamins.
I add chicken, spinach and corn and some milk for a chicken chowder.
Beef, rice, peppers and some frank red hot sauce for a warm winter treat!
Pork chunks, one can of black beans, one of white kidney beans and some pasta!
The possibilities are endless with the soup starter.

Wild grapes are free, growing freely along abandoned rail lines throughout Ontario and they make a GREAT jelly. We make ours with sugar, lemon juice and certo. When I was younger at my aunt's house in Burlington, we would drive up to the mountain and pick grapes for hours. I learned from one of the best preppers when it came to "free" stuff (the woman never paid for sugar, I am pretty sure single handedly, she is the reason restaurant prices sky rocketed in the 80's, that woman took everything she could from a restaurant... sugar, salt, pepper, stir sticks, napkins, straws lol) used to drive us all crazy!

The Bernardin book is the absolute best when starting out canning. Remember though, nothing goes to waste. We even save all of our veggie scraps through the day when canning sauces and salsas, add these to a pot and boil them to make homemade V8 style juice. I do the same thing with fruits, leftovers make great juices! 🙂

Once you try a few recipes in the book you will gain some confidence and then I highly recommend googling and checking stuff out others have done online. When looking for jars, try Bibles for Missions or other second hand stores. Also, kijiji and the free ads in the news papers are good resources too. I got the majority of my jars from a lady who was downsizing her home after raising 9 kids! She had lived there for 42 years and I got 200 jars with lids plus extra lids for $20. What a deal! 🙂

Happy canning! And I would love to hear more about your garden plans and how it is working out! 🙂

My mother (also in Burlington) used to do a ton of canned peaches, they were fantastic in the winter, way better than the tasteless crap in the stores these days.

mamaizzy, you're a great example of what most of us are trying to become. I am anyway. Salute

Hi

I agree with the other folks, there is little that you can't can, low acid foods, including meat/fish, beans and veggies are pressure canned, and most fruits, juices, jam's jellies and sauces are all hot water bathed, last year I had a good year and put up just a touch over 1300 hundred jars, I have to say that I find most properly done canned food last well beyond a year with little loss in color or textures for up to a couple years. I tend to can bumper crops with a two year plan in mind, as you just never know what is going to happen in that garden the next year.

While not going to be anywhere near the same as canning pepper slices which tend to soften, if you want crunchy, pickling would be the way to go there instead, I make a fair number of batches of red pepper and green pepper pasta sauce, its a lovely way to get that taste of fresh peppers in the dead of winter.

I am a canning diva! I can everything I can get my hands on!

Do you get your pressure canner gauge tested yearly? If you do...where do you get it tested. There doesn't seem to be any testers in Canada like there is through the agricultural extensions in the USA

Nope, never had it tested and I bought it used.
I didn't even know you had to get them tested.

My mother (also in Burlington) used to do a ton of canned peaches, they were fantastic in the winter, way better than the tasteless crap in the stores these days.

mamaizzy, you're a great example of what most of us are trying to become. I am anyway. Salute

Thanks so much! 🙂

I am trying to be like my gran lol She could cook anything on a woodstove (and man did that woman COOK!!!) plus everything was canned/frozen that she could get her hot lil hands on.
Last summer I was out for a walk with my guys on a hot day in September and noticed the neighbour had a purple crabapple tree. I knocked on the door, introduced myself as "the hippy down the street with the bright yellow door and weedy garden" and asked "Are you using those crab apples?" She said "No, I don't know wht to do with them." I asked "If it is ok with you, my boys and I would like them and in return I will bring you some crab apple jelly by the weekend!" She was thrilled. It was a win win win! No wasted food (I hate waste), helped her out because all of those would have hit the ground and made an awful stench by the end of September and we got crabapple jelly. My kids and I went home, grabbed some bags and step ladder and within 2 hrs we picked it clean!
We started making jelly and after 2 batches we started making pie filling. There were sooo many apples! In the end, I filled a shelf in my pantry with apple sauce, jelly, pie filling and had enough for some wine 🙂 I took 3 jars of everything back to the neighbour 2 days later with a fresh french loaf, she was amazed at how much we made and said "Next year, they are all yours again!" She has no interest in stocking up or using the apples and I have a few dozen of everything left over and 21 bottles of crabapple wine on hand (I did run them a couple of bottles over at New years though).
I am like my Dad that way, if you aren't going to use it then can I? I will share the bounty once done as a thank you but please do not waste it.

~Iz

You can choose to buy pressure canners that use weights, five, ten or 15 pds, given how hard it is to find someone in Canada that does pressure gauge testing, with the set of three, even if you move around canada I like have, you can just adjust your weights depending on your height above sea level so you can safely match your weight to height to time in regards to the food being processed.

Hi Ratdogmom

I bought a weighted pressure canner because I could not find anywhere to get the dial gauge tested. I seem to remember reading somewhere on the internet that you can convert the dial gauge to the weighted but I have no recollection of where I might have found that. I've heard that it's even getting difficult in the USA to find somewhere to get the gauge tested and that the cost is about the same as buying a new gauge. Just bought a new rubber seal & vent for my pressure canner yesterday at my local Home Hardware which is the only place I could find that stocked them. I'm good to go for the next canning season now.

The price of new jars have gotten ridiculous in my neighbourhood and even the lids that I used to be able to buy for 99 cents a box the best price I've found is $2.38. I think canning has gotten more popular because one year I needed more lids and I had to really search several stores before I found some. Now I buy a few boxes every so often so I've got a good amount put away.

Foxglove

First off, I don't have a canner. There was one in the garage after my parents died and without knowing what it was I tossed it. I know now it was one of the large aluminum (I think American) ones, damn fool.
There must be a chart somewhere that says this temp= this pressure. try this one http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/boiling-point-water-d_926.html
If your canner is nearly full of water why not measure the temperature (stick on temp gauge on the outside) of the canner. If the relief valve pops at 228 deg F you know it works at 5lbs pressure , 240 is 10 lbs etc.
If your canner is good for 10 lbs and you see the temp go much beyond 245 then you should probably STOP. Once you superheat water beyond the atmospheric boiling point any drop in pressure will cause all the water to boil instantly - a geyser. If contained, it's a bomb. Steam expands faster than dynamite.

I'm sure there's a considerable safety margin built in but - see below-
I am not an engineer- do not sue me if this doesn't work or you blow yourself up.

A pressure gauge is a pressure gauge. Take your gauge and a similar capacity pressure gauge and hook them up to 2 ports on a "tee" fitting. Put a pressure source (air compressor w regulator?) on the 3rd side of the tee. If both gauges read the same, it's working.

Tap an extra fitting into the canner with a threaded plug. Take your compressor with regulator and pump 10 lbs into the canner, the gauge should read 10 lbs.

I don't have a canner, anyone with doubts about theirs should send it to me for proper disposal.

This site is pretty informative when it comes to pressure canners. It shows you what the pressure should be for either type we have discussed on here. http://www.culinarycafe.com/recipe/Canning/canning%2Bspecifics
Hope it helps someone out.