“Just use whatever vinegar you have,” my neighbor Carol said, waving her hand like it was nothing. She’s been canning for forty years and has never lost a jar to spoilage. I took her advice, used some apple cider vinegar that was probably four percent acidity instead of five, and threw out every jar a…
I used to think small-space vegetable growing was just regular gardening with less room. Cram in what you can, water it, hope for the best. Three years of actually doing it — first on a suburban patio before we moved out here, then in the tight spots around our Tennessee farmhouse — taught me that…
I used to think canning pickles was the forgiving kind of preservation. You throw cucumbers in brine, seal the jars, done. Three batches of soft, murky, sometimes suspicious-smelling pickles later, I started taking it more seriously. If you’ve been digging around for the best canning recipes for pickles and relish and coming up with conflicting…
Everybody online will tell you to “just go vertical” and suddenly your tiny patio becomes a thriving food forest. That advice isn’t wrong exactly, but it leaves out about half the relevant information, and the half it leaves out is the part that will actually trip you up. I spent a lot of time in…
Most of what I read about canning pickles and relish when I first started was either wrong or incomplete in ways that mattered. I’m not talking about obscure edge cases. I mean the fundamental reason a jar is safe to eat, skipped over in favor of photos of mason jars lined up on a windowsill….
If you’re trying to get a decent small space vegetable garden design aesthetic going without spending $800 on matching terracotta pots and a custom cedar trellis, I can help. Most of what gets written about small-space gardening is aimed at people with balconies in cities and a decorating budget. This is for everyone else—people with…
The jar didn’t shatter dramatically. It just cracked along the bottom seam sometime in the night and leaked pickle brine across the shelf until it pooled on the floor. I found it at two in the morning because I couldn’t sleep and went to the kitchen for water, and stepped in it barefoot. That was…
I assumed canning was mostly about jars and boiling water. That was the whole mental model I had when I first started looking up a cowboy candy jalapenos canning recipe after our second summer garden overproduced so badly that I was handing peppers to anyone who made eye contact with me at the farmers market….
Someone in a Facebook canning group told me that tomato sauce is fine in a water bath canner because tomatoes are acidic. She said she’d done it for twenty years and nobody got sick. That may be true, but it’s also exactly the kind of logic that makes food safety people lose sleep. Tomatoes sit…
Most cowboy candy jalapenos canning recipes tell you to slice your peppers, make a syrup, pour it over, and process the jars. And most of those recipes produce something that looks right in the jar but turns out soft and weirdly soupy once you open it. I made four batches before I figured out what…