The Complete Guide to Home Canning & Preserving

Step-by-Step Water Bath and Pressure Canning, Fermenting, Dehydrating, and Meals in a Jar to Build a Safe, Long-Term Food Pantry for Beginners

Water-bath and pressure canning, fermenting, dehydrating and root cellaring, taught from zero in one book. Every canning process follows current, tested guidance from the USDA and the National Center for Home Food Preservation, with the why behind each rule.

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Series: The Self-Reliant Provider, Book 2
Paperback: 166 pages, 7 × 10 in
Interior: Black and white, with line diagrams
Published: June 15, 2026

The reader

Who it's for

You bought the pressure canner, and it's still in its box. You can cook, you follow a recipe with care, and the garden keeps handing you more than the house can eat fresh.

What you don't have is anyone left to ask. The people who knew how to do this are gone, and the internet argues with itself. This book assumes you've never sealed a jar, and it never talks down to you.

The book

What's inside

The one question that decides the method, high-acid or low-acid, and how to answer it about any food.
Water-bath canning for jams, pickles and acidified tomatoes.
The pressure canner explained one part at a time, until it stops feeling like something that might go off in your kitchen. Then vegetables, beans, meat, game, fish and whole meals in a jar.
Recipes on one template: method, jar size, headspace, processing time, altitude adjustment, exact ingredient amounts, and a safety note naming what you must never change in that recipe.
Real chapters on fermenting, dehydrating, root cellaring, freezing and smoking.
A troubleshooting guide, full altitude charts, master processing tables, a glossary and a real index, so you can find what you need with your hands full.

Read a page

The first jar I was afraid of

I remember the first jar I was ever truly afraid of.

It was green beans, low-acid, the kind of food that can genuinely hurt the people you love if you get it wrong, and I had processed them myself in a pressure canner I only half understood. They sat on my shelf for a week before I would let anyone at my table eat them. I checked that lid more times than I would like to admit, pressing the center, listening for the click that would mean it had failed, finding nothing wrong and checking again anyway. I tell you this so you know I am not writing to you from some calm place high above the fear. I was certain that one mistake could harm my family, and I had no one nearby to ask.

I have put food by for more than thirty years now, and the fear is long gone, but I have not forgotten what it felt like. I grew up in a house where a full cellar was the difference between an easy winter and a hard one.
From the Author's Note, The Complete Guide to Home Canning & Preserving

Straight talk

Where the rules come from

Every canning process in the book follows current, tested guidance from the USDA and the National Center for Home Food Preservation. The book doesn't invent a processing time, and it doesn't pass along shortcuts: no water bath for low-acid food, no oven canning, and no canned butter or flour.

Each rule comes with the reason behind it, because a rule you understand is a rule you'll keep. The book won't pretend canning is quick, either.

It isn't a color cookbook. The pages are black and white with line diagrams, by design. And it's written for a household kitchen and a few jars at a time, not a farm-scale operation.

Before you buy

Common questions

Is this book for complete beginners?

Yes. It starts from zero and assumes you've never used a pressure canner.

Does it include processing times and altitude adjustments?

Yes. Every canning recipe states them, and the back of the book has master tables and full altitude charts. This site doesn't reprint those numbers, because a time pulled out of its recipe is exactly the kind of shortcut the book warns against.