Canning season is ending

My mom used to can when I was a kid. Jams and pickles, mostly. I think my "help" consisted of washing and hulling strawberries until I got bored and went out to play. Then I grew up, left home, and didn't think about homemade preserves for the next twenty years.

I got back into canning when I bought a house with an apple tree in the backyard. I bought a box of jars and asked myself "How hard could it be to make apple jelly?"

Harder than it looked, it turns out. Jelly is not something to start with.

The next year I went strawberry picking. Coincidentally, that was the year that a friend's grandma passed away, and the friend gifted me all of her old canning jars and supplies, which saved me a ton of money.

If you're going to start canning, begin with strawberry jam. It's fast, it has about 5 ingredients (if you go by the recipe on the Certo pack), and it's next to impossible to mess up. Once you buy the jam jars, you can even make it in pots that you already own.

We've advanced in the last five years. We stared with jams and moved on to dill pickles and pickled beets. Then we graduated to sweet pickles and salsa (a lot more work.) This year we tried a pressure canner for the first time. We canned green beans. We opened a jar to try them and... they smell and taste like green beans from a can, so that worked. Now we have to figure out how to make them more flavourful. But they were the most basic thing we could try.

Our canning equipment gets a real workout in the summer, but if you want to try it, you can start over the winter. You might find some used equipment for cheap on online websites, and you can use frozen fruit since fresh won't be in season. If the "water bath" part sounds intimidating for your first time, you can even start with a freezer jam and work up to it.

Give it a try. Expand your skill set. And enjoy your toast and/or ice cream topping.