Welcome to Creative Canning!
My name is Ashley, and I’ve been canning food at home for more than 20 years. Each year, my family and I put up over a thousand jars of homemade food right on our pantry shelf, and I’m so happy to share those recipes and techniques with you all.
I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology from Dartmouth College, and I spent the first five years of my post-college career working in logistics and quality control for surgical instrument sterilization at a major university medical center. The principles of safe home food preservation aren’t all that different; they are just on a smaller home scale.
All the recipes on this site follow USDA guidelines where appropriate, as well as safe canning guidelines from state extension services, independent testing labs, and other reputable sources like Ball Canning, Bernardin, Mrs. Wages, and Pomona’s Pectin.
I also run the blog Practical Self Reliance, which has information on all manner of food preservation techniques (cheesemaking, salt curing, fermenting) as well as just about everything else you’d need to learn to be self-reliant in this modern world. It has its own substack as well, and you can subscribe to practical self-reliance separately as well. That newsletter comes out weekly and covers canning, as well as everything else.
My family and I live in a solar-powered homestead on 30 acres in rural Vermont, and all of these recipes have been tested in my home kitchen.
I’m so happy to have you here so I can share this abundance with you!
