That's so cool! A whole separate kitchen for canning would be awesome! This is my first year of canning, although my Mom did can tomatoes. I was just at Meijer's yesterday & bought a new canning kettle so I can do quarts next year. I only did pints this year. I saw their 1 1/2 pint jars & thought that was a great size. I can't remember what the price was in the store, but they are having a buy 2 get 1 case free sale on their jars. I think I may pick up a few for next year. Just wondering about processing time. I figured if you processed for the same amount of time as a quart, then you'd be good.

I use one half pint jar every time I make Annie's Salsa because I always seem to get ~7.5 pints per batch. Other things I use 1/2 pints for are pickled garlic, and bean seed saving. In the past I have used 1/2 pints for prepared horseradish that I freeze but I have found that often I don't use all of the jar before it greens up in the frig so this year I bought a dozen 4 oz. jars for the horseradish.

Paula, DS's co-worker's name is Roy and I've never met him, but he must have gardening family members because he is so appreciative when I send peppers and tomatoes to the guys at the station. I've noticed the folks who are most appreciative when receiving fresh produce or home-preserved foods are those who know just how much work it takes to raise and/or can those home-grown veggies. When Roy sent me the case of jars via Chris, I immediately packed up a case of 12 jars of assorted home-canned goodies for Roy and his family and sent them back to him via DS on their next work day. (One good turn deserves another.) In that assortment was my last jar of Blueberry-Lime Jam. A few days later, DS said that 'my' Blueberry-Lime Jam reminded Roy of his grandmother's Blueberry-Lime jam and that they loved it. So, I assume the Blueberry-Lime Jam recipe has been in the BBB forever and that his grandmother likely made exactly the same recipe 'back then' that we still make today. Just a reminder that there's nothing really new under the sun. I think that we have to talk about something or we'll go crazy...and canning/dehydrating/storing the harvest is an important part of being a gardener too. After all, if your garden is producing well, there's no way you can eat all the produce fresh, assuming the garden is large like yours and mine. I was harvesting okra yesterday evening and noticed I have about a gazillion peppers to harvest. Gggrrrrr. I haven't even used up all the peppers I harvested last week. Uh oh. I simply cannot let the peppers start piling up like this because you remember what happened to me last year. I've been working hard to can peppers every week so I don't get behind like that again, but there's a million things on my 'to do' list everyday, and sometimes I don't have time to can. I guess today I could smoke some and freeze them to go with the 2 or 3 or 4 gallons of peppers already in the freezer. Tim hurt his back yesterday when he and DS were moving the big deep freeze from the garage into the house. I had read that motors on deep freezes kept in outbuildings often burn out in 2 or 3 years because they have to work so hard to keep the freezer cold enough, so I've been asking (alright, nagging) Tim for months to move the freezer into the dining-room-turned-TV-room-turned food storage room/Mom's hobby room. Finally, DS and DH were both here at the same time and thought they'd move it yesterday. You probably have to be a woman to appreciate this next bit because it so perfectly illustrates that macho man type attitude that hurts men...... I was in the once-formal dining room in which we rarely dined (except for holidays we eat in the breakfast room so to me the dining room is wasted space if all you use it for is holiday dining), moving things around to make room for the freezer and Tim comes in, grimacing, and telling me we'd "have to" empty the freezer in order to move it because it was too heavy to lift fully filled. Really? I was practically speechless and all I could say was "What were you thinking? Tell me you didn't try to lift it fully loaded? Of course we have to unload it. I knew that. What were you thinking? What were you thinking? What were you thinking?" Sheesh, men! Who in the world would try to move an almost-full 18 c.f. chest-style deep freeze without taking the food out of it?????? So, he made a trip to the chiropractor yesterday and will make another one tomorrow because he apparently either strained or sprained his back. When he called his boss and told him he wouldn't be at work yesterday because he hurt his back trying to lift a full deep freeze, the boss asked him what he was thinking and said something like 'you do know how old you are, right'? lol I don't know if a hurt back from moving a freezer qualifies as a garden-related injury but it should because almost everything in that freezer came from our garden. Finally, who are we to say someone can't have bread and butter pickles for dinner or supper or even breakfast? When we have jalapeno poppers left over from lunch or dinner, I like to eat them for breakfast the next day. Well, they are wrapped in bacon, so that's a breakfast food, right? Dawn

A couple of people mentioned Kroger's and/or Meijer's... well, neither of our 2 Kroger's had any nor did Meijer's, nor did TSC or Menard's. They had most all other sizes/shapes; not those. The link supplied by bbstx (above) took me to regular, not wide-mouth jelly jars. Of course, wide-mouth jars are not considered jelly jars normally. But I did a search of their site & found a dozen 1/2-pints for $22.62 - plus shipping! No thanks, I do not want them that badly! Wide mouth quarts listed there for $14.55. Go figure. Maybe I eventually will have to bite the bullet & try Wal-Mart, but I did scrounge around & found just enough jars (by transferring contents of wide-mouth jars of dried herbs I had into regular jars) to get my jelly made. More likely, I simply will wait until the next canning season rolls around, and in the meantime keep checking at thrift stores in my area just in case. Thanks to everyone for all of your suggestions. Happy New Year and have fun reading the seed catalogs that are arriving fast & furious!