Canning kitchen in the garage

 

Cast iron triple burner

Last summer I learned to can my garden produce in glass jars.  This involves boiling big pots of food and water for as long as a couple hours at a time, usually on the hottest evenings of July and August.  The resulting humidity in the house was very uncomfortable, so we would run the air conditioning all night.  That made canning very energy expensive in a way we didn’t anticipate.

This summer I’ll be doing much of my canning on this old bar surface.  This is set up in my attached garage immediately next to the 2-car garage door opening.  It’s also just a few steps from my actual kitchen.

The bar has been reused many times.  We inherited it with the house we bought 10 years ago and it held laundry for about 5 years.  It held an aquarium for about 3 years after that and when it was moving day we almost left it behind for the next buyer.  Instead, my wife talked me into taking it apart and cutting it down to it’s current short height.  She used it this way in her elementary classroom for a year or two before bringing it home again.  Now it has been repurposed again as a kitchen counter!

Canning here won’t be quite as convenient as inside the house, but it should work fine!  It will also be interesting to be able to measure EXACTLY how much we have to spend on the energy for canning (at $19 per tank refill).