One of the easiest and most productive things you can do at home is make your own jam. With a few specialized tools and a couple of hours of time, you can save yourself over $100 dollars. As an example, here are the actual costs of canning 35 jars of fresh strawberry jam:
- 10 pounds of strawberries = $10
- 12 pounds of sugar = $12
- pectin = $8
- lids = $4
- jars (reused, but originally purchased for about 20 cents each) = $7
- total of $41 in materials
This yielded an equivalent of 37 half-pint jars of jam. If you buy jam like this at the store or farmers market, you will pay $5 to $8 per jar. So, if we go with the low side, I have $5 x 37 = $185 worth of jam sitting on my kitchen counter right now. I’ve saved our family $185 – $41 = $144, and I have the added benefit of knowing exactly what ingredients went into those jars. Another way of looking at it is that it took me 2 hours to make the jam that saved me $144, so that is $72 per hour for my labor! Not too bad!
I tried something new with one of the batches this time: I left the green stems on the strawberries and blended it all together in my awesome vitamix blender. I’ll do a taste-test later to determine if I can detect a difference in taste.
Here is the recipe I used for strawberry jam:
- 5 cups of strawberries, mashed (or blended)
- 7 cups of sugar
- 1/4 cup of lemon juice
- 1.5 boxes of pectin
- Heat strawberries and lemon juice to a boil, stir in pectin, add sugar, stir until it boils for one minute, add to jars and process for 10 minutes.
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As I was planing some seeds last weekend I decided to go ahead and start a ‘garden diary’. At one time, I thought I would just mark what I planted and take pictures of everything and keep track of what/when things happened that way. After a few years of not really knowing what I planted because some critter always moves my markers around, I grabbed a small spiral-bound notepad and started taking notes. I’ll keep this notebook with all my gardening stuff so it will be available and usable while I’m in the garden. (unlike all my pictures on the computer inside the house)
