For most of us, unless we work rather hard and know what we're doing, gardening won't make much sense from an economic standpoint. Our gardens will please us with their beauty, the chance they give us to work with and commune with the earth, and the fun we can have meeting all the interesting plants and animals -- invited and uninvited -- that eventually will end up inhabiting them.

A similar situation exists with canning. After you buy the jars, lids, tops and spend so much time growing, harvesting and preparing the produce to be canned, and maybe even need to buy a pressure cooker -- from an economic point of view usually (unless you really work at it) it's just cheaper to buy canned goods at the local supermarket.

However, if you don't can, here's what you miss:

• the  satisfaction of storing your home-grown food for later use

• learning how to preserve food in case someday you'll need to do so...

• having better tasting, more nutritious food free of industrial preservatives and colorants

• getting to see your beautiful jars full of bright red tomatoes, bright green snapbeans, bright yellow peaches... lined up on their shelves, awaiting their big  moment when the time comes for Thanksgiving or Christmas meals

Each vegetable and fruit has its own special canning process so we can't tell you all about canning here. However, detailed information of many kinds is available at the following links: