I don’t know what’s happened, but it seems to me that suddenly canning is popular with a whole bunch of people. Or maybe it’s just that I’m trying to find extra canning jars in the middle of canning season. Whatever the cause, I’m looking for extra canning jars and not finding them. The thrift stores are cleaned out. There were at least five other posts on craigslist from people trying to mooch canning jars, the other day when I was hunting. Maybe the best time to do this in the spring. But it’s not not spring now, and we need the jars. Jessica’s out right now gleaning apples off of locals’ trees, in preparation for her apple-pressing appointment next week at a Mennonite farm up north. She expects to pick enough apples for 40 gallons of cider, and that takes a lot of jars.

Well, I found a Craigslist posting for cases of 13-oz jars, 50 cents for a dozen. I ran over there on my lunch break and bought them out of everything they had. They’re a local printing outfit that had these old silkscreened jars that were misprinted or something, and they just wanted to get rid of them. Bing! There I am.

It took two and a half dishwasher loads to get them all washed up. This load contains 83 jars. Jess went to work as soon as I could get them washed, and has used up all but one box of jars to can grape juice and grape jelly. Here’s one of the first grape juice batches using some of the new jars.

Last night we had homemade grape jelly on wheat bread hot from the oven. (The jelly was from a jar that didn’t seal.)

She’s canned all but 12 pounds of her original 200 pounds of grapes. A few apples remain to be apple-sauced, and then we’ll can all the apple cider next week, and that’ll be it for this year. By the time we’re done we’ll have around 700 jars of canned goods in the root cellar.