With the right tools and know how, you can have a reason to pick ALL the food growing in your garden (rather than letting nature take over). Let’s preserve all that garden fresh goodness!

In the last few years, Mariah has canned the following: Salsa, lots of jam (peach, strawberry, and raspberry are her favs), pickles, apple sauce, pie filling (apple, mixed berry), grape juice, apple juice, pears, peaches, pear sauce, tomatoes, beets...

Doesn’t that sound amazing?

Some people get into gardening because they want to put delicious foods in jars (Mariah), and some people get into canning because they realize that gardening without canning means a lot of wasted food (Lauresa).

Wherever you come from, you CAN can! (punny I know).

Here’s our collection of must haves for canning at home, and enough explanation to get you started.

First, Choose Your Canning Processor

In order to seal food in jars, keep the germs out, preserve the flavor, and keep your produce fresh for years, you’ll need a lot of HEAT. For that critical element of canning, you will need a pressure canner OR a water bath canner, though some people choose to own both.

Pressure Canning

A pressure canner will preserve any food you desire, including meat, vegetables and tomatoes without added acid. The high pressure helps gets the food hot enough for long enough to destroy all the really hard to kill pathogens. Specifically clostridium botulinum spores.

This pressure canner is the ultimate beauty and will last forever. Look at all that stainless steel! The key parts that make this a pressure canner are the internal temperature gauge (what tells you if you cooked the food long enough to kill the bad bacteria spores) and the seal that creates the pressure.

A lot of people ask if they can pressure can in their Instant Pot. Short answer is…no. If your Instant Pot has the “canning” feature, you may use it as a water bath canner (see below). But pressure canning is NOT the same as pressure cooking! The biggest issue with the Instant Pot is the lack of internal temperature reading.

Basically, if you want to preserve meat, un-pickled vegetables, or tomatoes without added acid, the ONLY method that is proven to kill clostridium botulinum (a spore that is really had to kill and might kill whoever eats it), is a legit pressure canner like this one!

If I’m scaring you far away from home canning, hold on, I have good news!

Water Bath Canning

Remember that scary bacteria I keep talking about? Fortunately it can’t survive in a high acid environment. Some foods are naturally high in acid (i.e. most fruit), and plenty of other foods can be preserved by adding acid (i.e. pickles, salsa, adding vinegar or lemon juice to crushed tomatoes, etc). This is probably the whole reason pickles were invented, and why people have figured out how to pickle pretty much any vegetable.

Adding vinegar or lemon juice (acids) keeps clostridium botulinium spores from growing and producing botulinum toxin - the thing that kills people. But there are plenty of other bacteria (spoiler alert: bacteria is everywhere) that can grow in a high acid environment, so we do have to “process” jars before we seal food inside.

Enter, the water bath canner! P.S. “processing” is the part where jars full of food with lids on top are boiled in water in the water bath or pressure canner. The processing time is always on your canning recipe, and we’ll get to that next.

Water bath canners process jars with foods that are high in acid: Most fruits, jams, jellies, syrups, juices, salsa, pickled anything, etc.

This water bath canner will last forever, is so simple in design that it’s easy to use, and it’s huge. So you can fit around 12 jars at once.

A note about canning with an Instant Pot.

Pressure cooking does not equal pressure canning. So stick to high acid foods. Use your Instant Pot like a water bath canner, and don’t wing it. I loved the video tutorial by Frieda Loves Bread (steam canning) if you really want to try this method out!

Next, Choose Your Recipe book.

This step may surprise you. A recipe book is one of the essential tools for canning? YES.

Did you know that home canning is regulated by the USDA? Seemed extreme to me until I remembered that feeding your neighbors your made up home canned recipe could literally kill someone. So let’s not mess with that, yeah?

Your canning recipe will tell you how to make the food that goes in the jar, then how to process the jar so it seals tight and the maximum amount of bacteria is destroyed. Processing times always have to be adjusted for altitude (more time for higher altitude) and that adjustment is also part of your recipe.

The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving has 400 tested canning recipes, is super affordable, and can come spiral bound! You can also look up recipes from your local University Extension for free and print them yourself. But I shopped around and this book is a better deal for this many printed pages of recipes, especially if you get free shipping!

The Small Canning Tools

Don’t forget the little tools that save you SO much time and hassle. The little tools also keep your fingers away from the burning liquids and sterile jars as much as possible.

The Jar Lifter

Maybe just don’t try to lift heavy glass jars out of boiling water with anything other than a jar lifter? I’m just imagining everything that can go wrong.

The Wide Mouth Funnel

You might think these are easy to find or you have something that works in your kitchen, (or maybe your garage?) but you don’t. Wide mouth funnels are designed specifically to fit wide and regular mouth jars while giving you room to spoon or pour whatever delicious food you have. This particular funnel is special because it doubles as a head space measurement tool!

Headspace Measurer

In order to get an excellent (and safe) seal on your jar full of food, you’ll want to have 1/4 inch of space between the food and the top of your jar. You could use a measuring tape, or you could use a special tool that makes measuring easy. Or you could use this wide mouth funnel that doubles for a measuring tape.

Magnetic Lid Lifter

You’ll need to keep your canning lids in hot water, waiting and ready for you to pick them up and put them on your jar with the food inside, ready for processing. The magnetic lid lifter keeps your fingers from being burned and keeps your not sterile hands away from the food and jar! It’s also extremely entertaining for a three year old.

This canning kit from Prepworks by Progressive is beautiful and way better designed than the cheap plastic kits you’ll find for just a few bucks less. And there are less pieces with the same amount of function. Very cool. The only thing it’s missing is a jar opener, but I got you covered in the glass jars section!

Don’t forget the jars and lids!

It really doesn’t matter where you get your jars and lids, or what brand, etc. But there a couple things do matter.

Glass Jars

Your jars need to be free of all chips and cracks. And they need to be squeaky clean and hot right before you use them.

Our favorite way to keep jars clean and hot is first, washing them with hot soapy water, then keeping them on a cookie sheet in the oven set at 200 degrees. When you’re ready for your jar, just take them out of the oven! Another option is cleaning with hot soapy water, then pouring boiling hot water inside while they sit in the sink until you’re ready to use them.

P.S. You’ll need canning rings too, if you happen to inherit jars without them. But new jars always come with canning rings and your first set of lids.

These cute rounded jars are hard to find in stores and this set comes with a SEWANTA jar opener! Check it out.

Canning Lids

Canning lids need to be brand new, never before used, every single time! I love that canning creates less trash and waste, but this is one item that can’t be reused. It’s all about that seal! Fortunately these are the cheapest part of canning, just grab a box at any retail store with canning supplies. Just don’t forget to match wide mouth lids to wide mouth jars and regular mouth lids to regular mouth jars.

So that’s it! All the essentials you’ll need for canning that you probably don’t already have in your kitchen. Now I have to mention the other things you really do need and maybe you don’t have them already:

Multiple dish towels
Measuring cups
Stainless steel pot for cooking (or you could use an Instant Pot!)
Long wooden spoon
Ladel
Lemon juice
Vinegar
A timer
Pectin (for jams and jellies)

My advice, find a friend who has all the supplies, pick a recipe and bribe said friend with food to make that recipe with them. Once you get that first time under your belt, buy all these things and you’ll be a canning master.

This post contains affiliate links… Happy shopping!