The real miracle of canning and freezing for us is winter pleasures. Especially up here in Ontario, when winter fruit comes from very far away and rarely tastes like much when it gets here, the pleasure of a fresh jar of jam or sauce made with put-by tomatoes is the bright, vibrant flavors. They taste like food should taste, are free of pesticides and all but the simplest preservatives, and keep the taste of deep summer available year-round.

We made 17 jars of strawberry jam with lemon zest this morning, and I guarantee that every puffed-out hot breath of aggravation this morning will be worth two sighs of deliciousness in January, when there's a foot of snow outside but it smells and tastes like July in the kitchen.

initial outlay is a bit steep, but used equipment and jars are everywhere. The real savings come on repeated reuse of jars and lid rings and the ability to store the harvest.

The knowledge of how to can is a basic skill and allows us to know what goes into our bodies.

This year for the first time, I am canning. And I haven't seen mention of the "real" Bible of preserving---Putting Food By. It was the gold standard for years; my parents & in-laws swore by it.

I garden organically, and I'm a Peak Oil-er. I'm canning so that I know how to do it & have most of the bugs worked out of the process, should I ever NEED to do it. So far my plan is to put up a batch of tomato sauce & juice and maybe some beans. Nothing extensive. Maybe some preserves when the grapes get ripe. Someone else mentioned doing chicken and beef stock which piqued my curiosity---perhaps I'll try that too.

This debate -- is it a virtuous, thrifty habit or a bourgeois luxury? -- seems to be going around in all sorts of forms these days, with respect to various forms of domestic economy: gardening, canning, cooking, etc.

And while it's fun (I suppose) to play it out in all its dimensions, the basic answer is almost always the same: do you like to do it? will you do it repeatedly, thereby creating economies that come from efficiency and reuse?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then you'll save money and probably have a smaller enviro footprint; if the answer is no, you'll lose money and create another set of things to throw away.

That said, as a person who fell in love with gardening by accident, let me say that it's all worth trying and giving a chance. The other, non-environmental, non budgetary joys that also come (like butterflies on milkweed) are worth it!

Unless you're lucky enough to stumble across some old Jewish guy with a Yiddish accent selling pickles out of a barrel, making your own pickles is the way to go. It's surprisingly easy, too. All it really requires is mixing the pickling juice and patience while the cukes pickle.

Like everything in this world: it's expensive when you don't know what you're doing. But if you actually develop the skill set, the cost drops. Canning (like gardening, carpentry, sewing, professional photography, etc) isn't something to be tried once and then abandoned, but something to develop over time.

Canning is about preserving food. You make strawberry jam when you can pick local berries for $1 a pound. Raspberry jam when you can pick for $1.50. Pickled sweet peas when you have too many pods in garden to eat before the next round of blossoms mature. Tomatoes when you count 200 blossoms on your six tomato plants. When Oregon albacore tuna is in season and you can buy it for $2.00 a pound- can it. Even then it's not much cheaper than the pet food available at the grocery store, but then it's not pet food. Brooklynites canning wild strawberries and then complaining about the cost makes about as much sense as me driving to NY to ride the subway and then bitching about how much money I spent on gas to get to the train station.

Every year, I grow basil and other fresh herbs. At the end of the summer, I make a big batch of pesto and freeze it. I also freeze chopped up herbs mixed with olive oil for use in cooking over the winter. As for tomatoes, I blanch them, run them through a food mill (or dilver) to take off the skins, and freeze the resulting sauce. I also blanch and freeze green beans. I also have several batches of cooked mustard greens in my freezer since they grew like gangbusters in our soggy, cool spring weather and I wanted to save some for later.

Materials: My freezer and plastic ziplock bags of various sizes, plus olive oil and pesto ingredients (parmesan cheese, walnuts and almonds). The only special equipment I bought was the food mill for making tomato sauce.

Total cost: Not a lot.

Time spent: Not a lot.

Sorry to rain on the parade, but almost all canned and preserved fruits are so loaded with sugar as to be nutritionally worthless and therefore most certainly fall in the category of luxury item.

Just look at the recipe included in the article. 5 1/2 cups of pure white sugar to help raise your already chronically elevated insulin levels. Spread it on some white bread for a double shot of high blood sugar. Its a favorite fuel source for cancerous tumors, so that's good. And Alzheimers has been called type 3 diabetes because the brain damage is potentially being caused by a lifetime of chronically elevated insulin levels. Sweet!

So yeah, give your canned sugar to friends as a lovely gift. You might as well include a pack of cigarettes and some dirty needles.

Canning, freezing, storing in the cellar are all effective ways to preserve great food from our garden. To me, gardening is like therapy and a good opportunity to spend time with my husband and daughter. We enjoy growing the food and I get some pride in carrying on the tradition passed to me by my Mom and Grandma.

The payoff is in the yummy, healthy food. The cost is probably a wash for us.

Oh, the agony of defeat, though! This year, I pickled some garden-fresh red beets and evidently cooked them too long prior to hot packing them. I have 16 pints of tasty, but mushy beets. Wah!