"Can Do": Overcoming Canning Fears

I have a very hard time canning because I have a small kitchen and no dishwasher.  But I desperately want to have the shelves lined with gorgeous home-processed canned goods.  Every time I get large quantities of food, I end up vacuum sealing it and freezing it because it's easier than sterilizing jars, filling the canner, finding unused lids, and processing the jars.

But now we have a cow coming in.  My freezer is FULL.  I have no room for the meat we're about to pick up.  So I put my big girl pants on and got to canning.  I started out easy, with half of a bushel of peaches.  They were on the seconds rack at our farm market.  I only lost four or five out of the whole batch to mold, which is a big deal for me.

 

I also reprocessed the strawberry preserves that I had made.  It didn't have enough pectin the first time around.

Canning those were so easy, that I asked my brother to pick up some more peaches.

With 16 quarts of peaches under my belt, I moved to tackle a big fear and source of anxiety:  pressure canning.  My mom gave me her old Mirro pressure canner a while back.  It has a weight instead of a gauge, and I had no idea what I was doing.  But I consulted the internet and my Ball canning book, and voila!

There are still some green beans in the fridge from the half bushel I bought.  I think that 6 quarts is enough for storage (for now) and that these will become ham and green beans for an easy dinner.