146 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



or materially slow up the preparation of the next 

 batch. And in any canning job preparation is 

 three- or four-fifths of the work. When two or more 

 people are working together, one person should be 

 definitely assigned to watch the cooker. 



To say we canned two hundred and fifty 

 quarts of tomatoes, tomato juice, peaches, pears, 

 and apple-sauce between the twenty-third of Au- 

 gust and the seventeenth of September sounds 

 like a fairly big assignment. I do not mind saying 

 we are glad when it is done. Not all of it has to 

 be done at once. The crop does not mature that 

 way. What we do is allow it to accumulate until 

 an empty evening or week-end, then knock out a 

 big installment; when you get production rolling 

 it goes much faster than when you do a small lot 

 at a time. Altogether we did canning on only eight 

 days in that month. 



Since it takes a lot of time whether you do it 

 in large or small batches, the important question 

 about canning is: Does it pay? In a previous chap- 

 ter I mentioned a bumper crop of tomatoes in 

 1937. When we were canning it I made some cost 

 records on it. Quart jars were four and one-half 

 cents apiece, retail. Good glassware will last four 

 or five thousand years; but allowing for breakage 

 and replacement every nine years and ignoring 

 the fact that a lot of jars are used twice a year, in 

 the summer for vegetables, the winter for meat 



