Although I am a master at freezing and dehydrating, I've been leery of canning for years. Finally, about 10 years ago, I decided to make some pickles. My mom and grandmother used to can tons of different pickles and I found myself so hungry for them.
I had no canning supplies, but thankfully, my wonderful MIL kept all her things and, quite willingly, gave me everything. That summer/fall, I made watermelon pickles, bread-and-butter pickles, chow chow (a PA Dutch conditment), red onions with white wine (which is simply delicious over a steak), etc.
The next year, I found a recipe for a zucchini hot dog/hamburger relish that is just divine. After dealing with watery jars of relish found in stores, I decided to try the recipe. Yum! That recipe makes a lot of relish, but ironically, I never seem to have enough to get me through a full year; my sister loves it, DH's BIL loves it, our kids love it. Til I finished giving it away to people, I could probably make more! And it uses zucchini, so it's a great way to use up the zucchini in our garden. Win, Win!
I've now branched out a bit into canning peaches. I do two bushels of peaches every year and that will last pretty much all through the year, til it's time to can them again. Between the canned peaches and all the frozen peach pies and peach dumplings, we have enough peach-stuff to see us through.
I will tell you that I am meticulous! I was so afraid of botulism or food poisoning. My jars and lids are santized, my utensils are sanitized. No pets in the kitchen while I'm canning anything. Only clean cloths and such. I make everybody crazy. But I'm really meticulous about it.
I love to hear the ping! that tells me the jars are sealing!
I use a pressure canner for my red onions and my peaches. Because we have a glass-top stove and my canner has a rounded bottom, I can't get it up to the proper pressure for safe canning on the stove. I always use the pressure canner outside on our gas grill. It works beautifully on the grill.
I remember my co-worker's daughter and SIL canning over 100 quarts of some kind of tomato sauce a couple years ago. I don't know what they did wrong, but every single jar was bad. So bad that you could see it immediately upon opening the jars. It was ugly.
We freeze tons of applesauce and I make tons of apple pies and apple dumplings for the freezer. I dehydrate fruits and they are packaged up for snacking. Between our two freezers and my basement pantry of canned goods, we won't go hungry!