Here's a link to a great web site for anyone new to canning.

The National Center for Home Food Preservation

http://nchfp.uga.edu/

You will find a wealth of information there, as well as lots of recipes that have been tested for food safety, and those, as well as the recipes in the Ball Blue Book of Home Canning are two sources I suggest for safe recipes to use.

You can learn even more by taking the Self-Study Coarse at the link, or check with your County Extension Office and see if they have any canning classes available. It's important that you understand the basics of home canning before trying your hand at it in order to keep your canning experience safe.

Ball has a small canning rack with lifter designed to be used with a stockpot for a small amount of canning because it only holds 3 jars. It's called the Ball Home Canning Discovery Kit.

http://www.sears.com/ball-discovery-kit/p-011W025611380001P?srccode=cii_10043468&cpncode=45-119741123-2&sid=IDx20070921x00003c

I would suggest saving your money to purchase a 9-piece granite ware canner (check Amazon - Regular $70.99 for $39.97) and you'll be ready to go. Check your local stores (Wal-Mart, True Value, Ace Hardware) and they will have them available as well. This method for home canning is only for certain types of foods. For other types of foods you MUST use a pressure canner, and when you study the information at the National Center for Home Food Preservation, you will understand the difference. If you purchase a Ball Blue Book, be sure to read all the canning information in the book. I would also suggest the book from the National Center for Home Food Preservation entitled "So Easy to Preserve". All the recipes have been tested for safety in that book, and that's an important part of canning. Avoid using old, untested, recipes, and never make up a recipe yourself.

Happy canning....

-Grainlady

...and here's a link to the Garden Web forum that seems to focus on preservation and canning...Harvest.

Short answer to your question -- you can probably start with things you would have in a well stocked kitchen and need only a couple of tools (jar lifter is the most essental) if you want to do jellies, jams and more acidic foods. If you want to can most vegetables, you need a pressure cooker or canner. We started with our largest stockpot and a small round cake rack and I have used a pasta pot with a mesh insert for small batches.

I would suggest reading up onine and possibly buying a book for reference. Here's another link for an online resource: http://www.freshpreserving.com/ (the Ball home canning site)

One tip I read that I loved, if you have a large stock pot already and are doing water bath canning is to use a round cake cooling rack. I already had a jar lifter, etc. so purchasing a kit would be redundant for me. I like the granite ware canning pots but did not want to store another large stock pot so I did not go that route. The harvest forum linked above has many knowledgeable canners. Good luck.

I started out on the Harvest Forum, where their focus is on canning and preserving.

As mentioned, a pressure canner is necessary for canning vegetables, meats, etc. However, I canned for years with just a stock pot and a rack cut to fit. At first I used a towel on the bottom, but it floated up until I had placed the jars on top. A pair of wire cutters and a cheap cake rack and I was in business. I also heard another poster say they had made their own rack by wiring the rings to canning jars together into the appropriate size and shape. That would be a good idea, I think..

If you have not canned in the past, I would also suggest checking the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation. The Ball Blue Book costs less than $10 and has more varied recipes also.

Happy Canning

Annie

At the risk of being redundant, a water bath canning setup is only good for high acid foods. EVERYTHING ELSE has to go with a pressure canner. If you want to explore one of those, WAFCO's All American pressure canners are built like a tank and your grandkids will fight over it. Why pressure canning non-acid foods? It's because a water bath will kill botulism spores only in an acid environment. And botulism is not something you want to deal with. In most food borne illnesses, you're sick as a dog with vomiting and diarrhea--with botulism you stop breathing and die. Don't take a chance.

The Western United States has one of the highest incidences of botulism in the U.S. because of soil and high altitude, and these facts increase with home-canning - when it's done incorrectly. The soil conditions favor botulism in the west, so make sure you never use windfall fruit (found in contact with the ground) for home canning. And make sure you know your altitude so you can process your foods for the proper amount of time. It's not one-size-fits all. Here in old "flat" Kansas, the altitudes vary between 75 ft. to 4,039 ft. above sea level, so there are some areas of the state where adjustments for altitude need to be considered. If you don't know your altitude, just Google your town and there should be information including the altitude.

This is a story from the National Center for Home Food Preservation that was related to our class when we were getting certified to teach home canning.

"A 62-year old woman dipped her finger into the juice in home canned carrots. She was hospitalized two days later after feeling dizzy and having difficulty walking. She was still hospitalized six months later, but lucky to be alive after ingesting Clostridium botulinum, one of the most deadly food toxins."

-Grainlady

People here in California used to die of botulism all the time. Whole families would be wiped out. And that was with professionally canned foods. That doesn't seem to happen anymore (thank goodness! They've learned how to do it better), but I agree with the rest that canning isn't something to be done without expertise.

For easy, beginning food preservation, learn to use a vacuum sealer and a freezer. You still need to follow safety guidelines but it's pretty straightforward.

Besides all the recommended research, for canning, you'd be best off helping out someone who has mastered it before trying. Someone who will remind you of all the things you need to sterilize, and point out every time you make the sterile things dirty.

The latest publicized cases of botulism were actually from commercially bottled carrot juice and from baked potatoes in a restaurant which wrapped them in foil, baked them and left them sitting on the counter until served. Most cases of botulism from home canned products are localized, like an entire Alaskan village who erred when canning salmon.

To inject some reality here, there are few botulism cases from canned food yearly, the CDC says "How common is botulism? In the United States, an average of 145 cases are reported each year.Of these, approximately 15% are foodborne, 65% are infant botulism, and 20% are wound. Adult intestinal colonization and iatrogenic botulism also occur, but rarely. Outbreaks of foodborne botulism involving two or more persons occur most years and are usually caused by home-canned foods. Most wound botulism cases are associated with black-tar heroin injection, especially in California." So, out of 145 cases, about 20 are from home canned food. Since there are somewhere around 320 MILLION people in America, the percentage of chance is miniscule.

However, there IS still that chance and botulism isn't to be taken lightly. So vegetables and meats MUST be pressure canned. Fruits, jams, pickles, relishes with vinegar, those are safely canned in a water bath. Follow directions from a trusted source and you'll be fine. Too many people get scared away by the warnings, when the risk is actually minute.

Annie

Good points Annie.

To apply those stats to the question at hand and get a 'true' reflection of the chances of botulism poisoning from home canning, only those who consume home canned goods should be counted.

I have no idea where you would get such numbers, but I would hazard a guess at less than 1 per 100. Maybe even closer to 1 in 500. I know it may seem to people reading here that the numbers might be higher, but a lot of people live in cities where canning is very rare.

It's still not an epidemic, but when only the home-canned goods consuming population is considered, chances are a bit higher. It's a good thing that, these days, safety information is so freely and widely available!

For it to be 1 in 100 people who do home canning, it is 1 in 11 million who don't (per year), that would mean an infinitesimal amount of people are home canning. Too tired right now to do the math :)

And there are other situations where botulism spoors can grow...like garlic stored in olive oil.

But.... There's plenty else that can go wrong besides botulism. I think one of the reasons we have so much less incidence of botulism from home canning than we used to is that so many fewer do it, and those who do are well educated in canning and do it responsibly. There are plenty of other ways to contaminate your canning, though perhaps less lethal.

r green, that's true, but if you want a real problem to solve, try to figure out how many of those people eat home canned food and how often. Few of my family members can, but they eat things I can. So, although one of us cans, the 6 children and 11 grandchildren all eat home canned food on a regular basis. I use what I can, and so usually use 3 or 4 jars of home canned food daily, mostly vegetables. So figure out how many jars of food that is, LOL. It's impossible, of course. But still, if 20 people get botulism from food, and not all of those cases is home canned food, then the risk is still very, very small. Not much risk at all, really, if you follow the instructions to boil your homecanned low acid products 10 minutes before ingesting, which will render botulism virtually a non-problem.

In reality, the CDC had two confirmed cases of food borne botulism in 2013, more recent years are not yet available. One of those was from fish oil/blubber, the other from home canned food. So that's ONE case in 2013 that can be absolutely linked to home canned food. There were eight other "possible" cases, two of which were from blubber/fish oil, two from fermented fish heads and four linked to homemade turshi, a pickled vegetable product. Although food related, they were not canned foods.

The problems arise when people do not follow instructions and do silly things like can green beans in a water bath canner for several hours. Geez, even the Ball Blue Book has been saying you need a pressure canner since the 40s or 50s. Plus, as LIndaC mentioned, people insist on doing things like packing garlic in olive oil and leaving it on the counter, which can harbor botulism, but it isn't really canning.

Annie

I also want to add to the OP that there are many recipes on the web for home canning that are extremely dangerous. Just because the jar sealed, doesn't mean that the food in it is safe! I know of a person who was canning beans with meat and thought that when she got a seal right after putting the lid on, the jar was good to go! And she was waterbathing anyhow for a time period she just guessed at. She knew nothing. So scary and so dangerous.

A person new to canning should make sure that any recipes she uses are tested and approved safe.