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It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of spring. Whether you garden yourself or just look forward to buying fresh produce from the farm stands and grocery stores, we can become a little too enthusiastic about our wants and needs.
I remember one year, my mother and I had the canning fever in a big way. Peaches were available and the best tomatoes we’d seen all season. We wanted to can enough so that we would have supplies to get us through to next summer. We decided to spend a weekend canning both...at the same time.
We bought bushels and bushels of both. We planned to just can the peaches but with the tomatoes, we wanted stewed tomatoes, tomato sauce, salsa, all kinds of things. After 2 days, we were hot, exhausted and nowhere near done. I sent mom home with the idea I would finish up over the next couple of days by myself. Needless to say, my plans didn’t go well. I threw out a couple of boxes of tomatoes that spoiled before I could get them processed.
The results were less than spectacular. I had run out of tomato products before January arrived and I was still eating peaches 3 years later. I learned a lot from that experience.
· Only buy what you need. If you are the only family member who will eat canned peaches, one bushel is more than enough.
· Break up the canning into manageable chunks. For us, in the case of tomatoes, we use quite a bit. I learned to buy enough for one end product at a time. I spend one weekend making salsa, another making tomato sauce and so on. It is much easier that way!
· Plan what your family will need. If you plan to can so that you have enough to last a year, there are some steps you can go through to make sure you are canning the right amount. I wrote an article about it using green beans as an example but the process works well for anything.
It is easy to become carried away by things we are passionate about. I’ve learned that if I approach it with a cool head and calm heart, I can accomplish my goals of preserving healthy, tasty food for my family while still enjoying the process and not spending a fortune on it.
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