Being relatively new to canning and storing food from our garden, we've now realized that we've been over canning each season (despite the fact that we really do meal plan and utilize our food stores). Lesson(s) learned.
Things reached their peak this year as we ran out of room to store any more. It's also become harder and harder every year to find what we're looking for as things were stored in a bit of a mish mash.
Time to go through, get rid of the old stuff and re-organize so that things are easier to find and so that we're not storing food we're not going to use due to age. Another benefit will be not having to buy canning jars next year.
From dust to dust as they say; or, from dirt to dirt. We're not going to waste our excess. We're putting it all back into our garden for "compost" and "chicken scratch" as we've now opened up our garden to the chickens for the remainder of the fall and winter.
While it was a little challenging to empty our canning jars and "feed" the garden, I landed upon a method that ended up working pretty well. I filled our wheel barrow about 30% with wood shavings, then emptied enough jars as the wood shavings would hold, then wheeled it all on over to the garden and dumped. Rinse and repeat.
As I write this, I am taking a break. The next step will be using the garden hose to do a preliminary rinse of the jars and then using the wheel barrow to bring the jars to my side door (closest to my kitchen) to wash the jars and box them up for next season...
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