Yep - start canning dried beans - fill those jars, don't let em stand empty.

Bejay

Oh, I can SO relate to this!!
My empties are stored in the detached shop. This means a 100' trip through the rain to store them where they belong.

I keep a small box in the house and fill that up (sometimes 'overfull'...). I force myself to take them out and put them where they belong at least once a week. On a weekend when I'm home in the daylight.

The boxes in the garage are well marked and organized and I do put the jars in the appropriate box when I get there.
I really have discovered that this saves lots of time during canning season as I can run out and grab a dozen wide-mouth quarts at a glance.

I'm an Avon Rep and the boxes that our products are delivered in are perfect for a dozen jars (more for small jars, obviously). There's a blank space on the side plenty large enough to label. I have a big industrial shelf that will hold 4 boxes per shelf. When a box is empty, I turn it upside-down so I know.

I still hate taking them out.....I am lazy too. :-)

Deanna

I put the empties back were I took the full one from. They're out of the way and I know where to look for them when I need them. At my age, if I try and move anything to another area it will be forever lost to me and my son will stumble upon them when I die.

Yep - start canning dried beans - fill those jars, don't let em stand empty.

Okay - so my granny makes my dad take her to the "food pantry" every two weeks. My dad gets annoyed because he says for the amount of time it takes and the amount of food she gets, he would rather just buy it for her. My grandma is 90+ years, on a fixed income, and will have none of that. After all time she put into working, paying taxes, supporting a family etc., if she is technically eligible for it, she is taking it. Can't say I blame her.

And for the record, this is the same woman that I took clamming at 88. And she held her own. At 90, she went on a church trip to Atlantic City and pulled an all nighter at the slot machines. The organizers of the trip were flipping out because she never made it to her hotel room. While I don't know the whole story, I do know that casino security was involved. And they ended up tracking her down through the security cameras. Only to find her at 6 am still playing the slots. I can only hope it runs in the genes.

She knows I am in the middle of a divorce with two kids. I made the mistake of asking her for her old Italian recipe for making Escarole and Beans. I love that stuff. Ever since then, she has been sending 2 lb bags of cannellini beans over from the food pantry. It is coming out of my ears. It is so much easier just to buy a can of pre-soaked beans. Time to start figuring out how to can beans in the new PC Santa brought me. Gotta love my granny :-)

And P.S. She also sends over the best cans of grape juice. Can't figure out where to buy it so I am always pestering her for it. It is a generic package. It is the old school purple juice. And the ingredients just say grape juice and water. No high fructose corn syrup in that. I wish I could figure out where to get it!!!

I keep a box handy and put the empty, clean jars in there. When the box gets full, or I know I'm going out there, I take them to my shed, where I have all my jars and rims, sorted. The rims are all separate in thick plastic bags, and I still have the cardboard bases to put my jars in, organized by size of course. Yes, it's a pain, but it's a method that works for me and very handy when needing jars during canning. I WISH I only needed to go to a basement!
Right now, it's almost too cold to take a quick trip to the shed! It's 18 degrees out there this morning! But at least it's not snowing or icy.

Can them full of water to use for any emergency you might have and put them back into the shelves. Power outages are very common here so the well doesn't work and those jars of water come in real handy.

Plus it keeps the jars clean. ;)

Dave

Ugh ! I have so many empty jars. I need to go out and rearrange the cabinets. It is cold out there, though. I have to get it done since I am using so many of my jars of food up.
I tried boxes,and I do fill some, but they don't fit in the cabinets very well. If I could afford to do it, I would buy clear plastic storage boxes and sort them in sizes. Then just pull out the box of the size I want when going to can something. I still may do this with some of them.
As for the grape juice, I make my own. We get Concord grapes and use the steam juicer. It is just fresh juice, not even any water added. It is so purple and so strongly flavored. Very nice, especially for jelly making. Perhaps you can check into making your own, juice, as well.
For the dried beans, I store extras in mylar bags with O2absorbers. Even beans can get dried out too much and will not rehydrate after a period of time.
I use a pressure cooker to cook up fresh beans. I tried canning them but I don't like the texture as well as cooking them up in the pressure cooker. Doesn't take long to cook them this way.

A friend who cooks mostly vegetarian gave me a great bean tip.
Soak in cold water overnight in the fridge. Drain the water, throw the beans in the crockpot and add new water (at least double the amount of beans).
Cook on low all day. Perfect bean, no stirring, no fuss. You can freeze the extras, so just make a big pot full while you're at it. The frozen ones are pretty much just like canned beans. I use zip top sandwich bags (which hold 2 cups nicely, roughly the same as a can of beans for recipes), then put those into a large ziploc for double protection.

Beans on demand! About 2 minutes in the micro thaws them too if you forget to take some out for something.

Deanna

I, too have many jars. Really need to rearrange the cupboards for putting back empties.
In the mean time I put a large plastic storage container with a lid in the basement and placing them there until I get my rear in gear to rearrange.
It's been so bitter cold I haven't been very motivated to juggle the jars.

Like dian57, I keep my empties with my "fulls." My pantry shelves always have about the same number of jars on them (give or take a few dozen that have been given away, or are harbouring leftovers, in the dishwasher, or seconded for wasp trap duty). But in November about 90% of them are full, while in May about 90% of them are empty. After every dishwasherload I take the clean empties into the pantry and put them where there's space, rearranging a wee bit as necessary, pushing full jars to the front & grouping batches of the same size together near things that I can in that size.

I used to keep my empties in the basement and my fulls in the kitchen, and I NEVER could make myself do the trek just to put empty jars away so there were bags and piles of empties near the stairs waiting to be taken down (and getting knocked over by cats, dogs, nehpews, etc.). ANd I'm bad at getting around to big re-org projects, too, so it works better for me to just do a teeny bit of re-org each time I do dishes.

Can I say, btw, that the every time I take several used canning jars out of a dishwasher, I get a little happy feeling? It reminds me that my home-canned food is now an integral part of my life, if you see what I mean. When I began, my canned goodies were few and often esoteric things saved for special occasions or to show off for guests. Now the home-canned-goods pantry is just where I get my tomato sauce from, as a matter of course.

Everyday joy.

Z

Zabby, I also smile when I see the empty jars, especially when Elery is cooking and I find 3 or 4 empty jars in the dishwasher, I've got him using the home canned stuff when he's here too.

My empties are kept in the basement in boxes, I used to keep the boxes the jars came in until the packaging changed to the infernal way they are now, all shrink wrapped. Now I take copy paper boxes home from work when they are empty, they have lids. A layer of quarts will fit, and two layers of pints, with some newspaper between, and with lids I can stack the boxes. Canned goods go on the shelves, I'd love to have shelves for all of the empties too but I don't have enough shelves.

Whenever I go into the basement to get something, I take whatever clean jars there are and put them into the boxes, so at any give time there could be half a dozen jars waiting on the end of the counter to go into the basement but seldom more. I have a separate Rubbermaid box that I use for the rings and to store boxes of unused flats so no matter what size jar I'm using, I just grab that box and take it upstairs and I have rings and lids for whatever.

If I bring up a box of jars, I put whatever I canned into the box to carry it back down, that way the boxes are always where they belong.

Annie

I posted the introduction from the Ball Brothers Book "How to Use the Foods You Can" by Ira B. Allen copyright 1924. The introduction gives an overview of canning through the year, including discussing "empties". Just, possibly, some interesting reading.

Here is a link that might be useful: Why can?

digdirt - when you say "can water" - do you mean filling with water and covering with a used lid to stick up on the shelf or are you somehow actually processing them to make the lid pop down?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but you got me a little confused as to whether you are actually processinjg it somehow.

Nancy

We have a large(30'x50')attached garage right off my laundry room. In one area, I have some shelves for my canning. Whenever I go out to the car, I can take out whatever jars that need to be taken out. It is just a few steps from my door so it is easy to grab a jar or two for dinner.
Donna