Tomato Canning Quick Reference Guide

When it comes to eating a real food diet, growing your own food is one way to ensure the quality of your food while saving you money in the long run as well. Gardening can also be a terrific learning experience for the kids and can help relieve stress. When harvest time roles around, you will feel a sense of pride in your labor and your ability to feed your family well (with perhaps LOTS of zucchini 😉 ).

Canning is an excellent way to preserve your fruits and vegetables for the year. When I was growing up, I used to watch my grandpa can vegetables from his garden for hours. I was fascinated by the process and impressed by his gigantic wall of canned vegetables that we pulled food from throughout the entire year. He made the process of canning look easy, probably because he had been doing it for years and had it down to a science. No matter which vegetables he was canning, he never needed to look at information about how to properly can the veggies. Experience had taught him, and it was as if the measurements and fine details were engrained into his mind like files into a computer.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have the years of practice in canning like my grandfather had at the end of his life. I still need a lot of help when it comes to knowing how to correctly can each vegetable, and remain very dependent upon outside resources to remember the various factors that come into play while canning. That’s why I’m so thankful for this tomato canning quick reference guide. This printable combines all the information you need to know about canning tomatoes into one, easy to read resource. That way, you don’t have to worry about missing a step or important point. All your questions are answered right here! So until I become a master canner like my grandpa, this beauty will stay tucked safely inside my kitchen cabinet 🙂

“I was canning up tomatoes this past weekend, and I was sick, so I kept double checking things and kinda getting hazy about what the hell I was doing.

Moral of the story: do not attempt to can 100 pounds of tomatoes while sick. But as I was shuffling back and forth to my computer to double and triple check my acidulation and processing times at the National Center For Home Food Preservation, I kept thinking, “I wish I had all this information on one piece of paper that I could print out and not worry if it got totally covered in tomato schmeck.

So I made this. Hope you guys find it helpful, too.”