I have subscribed to World Affairs Brief for many years. It is a weekly news analysis service, which is excellent. At the end of each brief is a prep tip (for the coming hard times) on many, many subjects including off-grid communications, laundry and mending, public health/sanitation, gardening, home repairs, self defense, etc.
Here are just a few of the tips given there on jars and lids.
From the 8/31/18 brief:
PREPAREDNESS TIP: HOW MANY CANNING JARS? By Andrew Skousen
Growing your own fruit and vegetables in a garden is a major milestone on the path to self-sufficiency, but most crops come on in one short, overwhelming harvest per year, during the busy months of summer and fall. The trick is to preserve it to enjoy all year long. Many decades ago every farm’s housewife would “put up” hundreds of glass jar “preserves” for the rest of the year. Preserving food in glass jars is still the easiest way to make food shelf-stable over and over each year, but it may surprise you
how many jars you will need to preserve a year’s worth of food.
Don’t wait until you have a fully-functioning homestead before learning the canning process. Take advantage of bulk produce on sale or get to know the neighbors that are giving away produce if you don’t yet have a garden and trees. Learn how to use a pressure canner for non-acidic foods like vegetables and meat. Work on eventually replacing all the canned goods you buy with homemade versions. Pressure canned
green beans,
corn, tomato products, sauces,
pinto or black beans, fruit, applesauce and anything else you buy can be preserved at home (see my previous tips on
steam and
pressure canning). A big benefit of making it yourself is that you can modify the recipe to suit your tastes. Salsa, spicy pickles, meat in your preferred marinade, etc.; the options are endless.
Although healthy eating usually involves less canned goods and more meals made from scratch using fresh produce, making meals from your own canned goods does not sacrifice quality with cheap ingredients like the canned and frozen meals at the supermarket do. So the next step in healthy eating, is actually to transition back to making meals from your own canned goods. As you make your own healthy canned foods from garden produce you will regain the convenience of ready-made bottled food, but with better nutrition than you can get even from cooking up using fresh ingredients from the store. Canning is just making it from scratch ahead of time.
Now for
the numbers: When you are really living off your food preserves, I expect a family of four to easily consume four jars of preserves a day: one jar of fruit or applesauce, two or three jars of vegetables, beans or tomato products, and a quart or pint of meat in addition to staples like potatoes and grains and any fresh ingredients like eggs, dairy and cold-weather crops from a greenhouse or cold-frame. Assuming you don’t eat from these during the approximately 3 months of summer harvest (more, if you live in a warmer climate), that’s 275 days per year. 4 X 275 is 1100 bottles per year. This doesn’t include about a dozen pint or quart jars for each condiment you enjoy such as pickles, salsa, sauerkraut, hot peppers and jams.
That is a minimum. In our experience we need at least 50% more bottles to handle the periods of “bumper crops” to store it for the inevitable lean years where a late frost or blight decimates that crop for a year or two. This means right around 1600 or 400 bottles per person per year. A dozen quart jars takes up 16" on a typical 12" wide shelf. So each person needs 44 lineal feet of shelving. That’s two of the standard 4 ft wide x 2 ft deep shelving units with 5 shelves. Mason jars are only 7" tall, however, so you can easily double stack sets of jars if you put them in boxes and reduce this to
one set of shelves per person. To keep the double stacked product from falling out in an earthquake, I recommend the semi-clear plastic “
Jarbox” for easier, more secure stacking since it clicks into the jarbox below to keep from shifting around ($12 each). Cardboard boxes for canning jars are $4.15 apiece at
Uline.com. At a minimum put bungee cords or ropes in front of bottles to keep them from falling off the shelves.
Walmart currently has the best price on quart canning jars with lids (
$8.46 per dozen). But you will need to stockpile a lot of lids (see my in-depth
tip on lids). The cheapest lids at Wal-Mart are $0.25 apiece so get them in bulk from
Fillmore Container for only $0.16 apiece when you buy a sleeve of 348 or $0.14 apiece when you buy a case of 3132 (wide-mouth lids are slightly more). That may sound like a lot, but when you need to can over 1000 jars every year you will go through them fast. Someday canning lids will be a great barter item. Over $400 for a few years of disposable lids makes you want to consider reusable jars and lids. The Tattler lids are the cheapest option, but the plastic doesn’t stay sealed well for more than one year. The expensive
Weck Jars ($21 for six) is the best option with seals that rarely wear out (and are replaceable if they do).
I know canning is expensive at first and requires a lot of time and labor every year, but each step you make toward preserving the food you grow yourself is another food source you can depend on in hard times—all year long. [END]
From the 8/14/15 brief:
PREPAREDNESS TIP: CANNING LIDS by Andrew Skousen
As I said in the
first canning tip, the most important component in the canning process is the seal in the lid. The most common lids are from the Jarden Company (Ball, Kerr and Mason brands) with a built-in silicone sealing gasket where the lid touches the glass. If you avoid the Chinese imitations, these lids work very reliably but they are not very reusable. The sealing gasket conforms to the glass rim and develops a permanent depression. Many jars failed to seal.
If you use this popular canning system (and most people do) you will need a lot of these one-time use canning lids in your stockpile. How many lids? That depends: How good you are at other food preservation methods? You should learn to dehydrate food and build a
root cellar for keeping raw food fresh, but bottled food is a very nice in-between. On that note, I recommend the book “Putting Food By” (
old editions were better) for many preservation techniques including canning processing times and root cellar storage.
When will lids come back to stores? Hard to say. When hard times hit everyone will want jars and lids. Depending on rationing of metal, glass, etc. it could be a very long time before they reappear in stores... if ever. I fully expect the notion of “hoarders” to be demonized in society (more than in WWII) so anything symbolic of home preparedness might become blacklisted. Authoritative governments and dictators hate self-sufficient individuals because they aren’t coerced as easily.
How many jars do you have? 100 canning jars per small family is a bare minimum. With a good garden and a few fruit trees you can easily put away several hundred quarts each year. Get enough lids to bottle food in every jar you have at least 10 times over. Considering their excellent bartering potential (especially among the right kind of people) I would stock up with extra lids and jars. Note that half-gallon jars will hold twice the food per lid as quart jars. Bulk lids can be bought online for as little as $0.16/lid for
regular lids (70 mm) or $0.21/lid for
large mouth (86mm)—it is even cheaper if you buy by the case. For comparison purposes consider the cost for putting up 100 quarts every 10 years: for Mason jars (and 1,000 lids) it is about $250 for regular and $350 for wide mouth. Most of that cost is lids. Compare that with these options:
Tattler makes reusable plastic lids with rubber ring seals. These rings can be used until they break (some say they have used the same rings since the 70s). Tattler lids have some
pros and
cons include a higher failure rate to seal, difficulty assembling the hot lids and rings and the plastic “breathes” slightly. Their competitors claim these lids have lost up to 50% vacuum in jars over time. I suspect the white plastic (even though it is BPA free) also releases trace amounts of chemicals when under high heat and acidic environments (especially pressure canning), but in hard times I’ll be happy to keep canning even if it has a trace more of chemicals. The upside is big: Tattler lids are the cheapest reusable option. Even though they cost more (bulk price: $0.60-0.70/lid depending on size) they quickly pay for themselves. 100 jars, lids and rings that could last for 10 years can be had for only $150 for regular jars or $165 wide-mouth (this includes the cost of the jars but not S&H).
What did they use in old-fashioned times? Glass lids with rubber rings (or “jar rubbers”) held in place during processing by baling wire clamps. The USDA now recommends against this type of canning jar because supposedly you can’t tell if the seal was lost if it is still mechanically fastened. Don’t throw these jars away if you have them—just release the clamp after they seal. Test the jars in storage by periodically lifting slightly on the lids. There were also zinc lids with porcelain inserts and rubber rings, but those rings reportedly didn’t last long. You can find old parts on
eBay and at
Lehman’s but most sellers are demanding collector’s prices.
Looking for a modern version of the old-fashioned jars? Consider the European
Weck Jars. Sturdy glass jars and glass lids with wide, chip-resistant rims sealed with reusable natural rubber rings—this is the “Rolls-Royce” of canning jars. The FDA requires them to say that the seals need to be replaced every time, but they can be reused dozens of times until they become brittle and crack enough to spoil the vacuum. Unfortunately there’s also a Rolls-Royce price: The cost for 100 jars, lids and seals is about $350. That’s over twice the cost of a Tattler lid setup but comparable to the accrued cost of buying wide mouth lids for 10 years. Weck doesn’t have bulk discounts and the jars are rare enough you won’t find any replacements in hard times, but for quality, health and durability these are the best.
My recommendation: if you haven’t filled out your jar inventory yet, buy about 100 of the liter Weck jars (roughly equivalent to quart jars) and use them for canning now and in hard times. The rest of your jars should be cheaper Mason jars but set aside Tattler lids for hard times. Buy metal lids in bulk for peacetime use and later barter.
As a side note: Most commercial glass jars (pickle, jelly, ketchup, etc) with metal lids have a silicone seal (usually white). These bottles and their lids could be reused in an emergency—although expect a higher failure rate. Careful, the lids retain flavors so don’t put peaches in what was once a pickle bottle. [END]
Guess people are getting the message, if only subliminally. 
Here in Holland is nothing to find, the only solution is to import it from US through the shipping costs are higher that the canner its self. Don't know how much time we have left but it feels like the end times are already here..
