70 



CANNING THE SURPLUS 



1. The exclusive vegetable canning factory, canning just 

 corn or peas or some special crop that requires a very high 

 temperature, say two hundred forty degrees or more to keep. 

 This factory is operated by steam only and employs what are 

 known as closed top steam pressure kettles or cookers to 

 sterilize the goods. 



2. The exclusive fruit canning factory for canning fruits 

 and tomatoes only, which require a temperature of but two 

 hundred twelve degrees, the temperature of boiling water, to 

 keep them. 



3. The general purpose factory, which combines both 

 types. 



Prices on canning outfits range all the way from ten dol- 

 lars for the home canner with a capacity of a few dozen cans 

 per day to forty or fifty thousand dollars for the great, almost 

 automatic outfits with a capacity of two to three hundred 

 thousand cans per day. But there is no need for the individ- 

 ual grower to spend more than four or five dollars if he wishes 

 to experiment on canning his surplus tomatoes, beans, beets, 

 small fruits, and so forth. 



All we had when we started was two wash boilers used on 

 the kitchen stove. One was used to scald tomatoes, the other 

 to cook or process. The only other equipment used was a 

 ten-cent market basket to hold the tomatoes while being 

 scalded and a soldering copper costing eighty cents for sol- 

 dering tops on cans. For a charcoal furnace to heat the sol- 

 dering tool, we used an old iron kettle with a hole punched in 

 the bottom for a draft; and with this crude outfit we packed 

 the first year five hundred cans, using up and finding a 

 home market for about forty bushels of tomatoes, and the 

 quality of goods packed equaled that of the highest priced 

 factory. 



In spite of the advent of high priced machinery, that same 

 condition holds today, and the man with the inexpensive out- 

 fit can produce goods just as good in quality as the large out- 

 fits. In this line, as well as in many others, quality depends 

 more on the man than on the machinery. 



