Reclaiming Mason Jars
by Joshua Bardwell
Ane of the outset things I learned when I started canning was that I didn't have nearly enough mason jars. With a garden of any decent size, information technology'southward easy to fill up equally many quarts as you can stand to can, and those jars don't come cheap. Well, okay, the quarts are almost a dollar a piece if you club them online, but you've got to sympathise that I canned about twenty quarts of pickles alone this year, and I was hardly trying. Serious canners will hands put upwardly ii hundred quarts or more than of fruit preserves, pickles, tomatoes, beans, and so forth. One of the bloggers I read strives to keep ii years of preserves on the shelf, minimum. So it would be totally normal for a serious canner to have three to five hundred jars of various sizes in his or her collection.
The easiest way to increase one's store of mason jars is to outlive someone else who cans. You can score hundreds of mason jars from the un-knowing offspring, who'll practically pay yous to articulate out the deceased'south cellar, not knowing what kind of compensation they're parting with. At present, you lot might remember when I say, "bounty," that I'm talking about all those yummy comestibles that are safely locked up in the jars, only you'd be wrong. You lot see, canning is the original pack-rat syndrome. Some people whose blogs I read make an intentional try to motility through their stores, never letting them get too large or also small. But more common is the person who, every year, puts up equally much nutrient as he or she can possibly tin, then forgets about it for years.
My neighbor's mother recently passed abroad, and my neighbour graciously gifted me some of the jars from her stores. The about recent was some green beans from '06, which were shut plenty to edible that we really fed them to the pigs, although we weren't keen to consume them ourselves. The most dated was some "blackberry preserves" from '86, which was food in name only. In some cases, the lid of the jar had rusted clean through and the contents had turned into a dry, black mass, the original nature of which was completely indeterminable.
But stonemason jars are made of glass, and then they are infinitely reusable. Empty them out, give them a expert scrub in (very!) hot h2o, and maybe a bleach spray if you're nevertheless suspicious, and they're money in the bank. So away I went with a v-gallon bucket for the rejected contents and a trash pocketbook for the rings and lids.
That may look similar a milk crate of nasty dingy dishes to y'all, merely it'south money in the bank to me!
Source: https://www.babyschooling.com/homesteading/reclaiming-mason-jars/
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