Rhubarb!! We are overwhelmed with it. There is just so much you can eat.Friends either really like it or really don’t like it, so I can only give away so much. I would love to freeze some, but the freezer is full. We just have the freezer that is with the refrigerator…no large separate one. We use to have a big freezer, back when I had a big vegetable garden and froze produce along with pigs, beef cows, etc. We even had someone from somewhere in Canada come to the house once a week to deliver bread, English muffins, etc. That was great, but there were always loaves of bread that ended up in the bottom of the freezer, to be found a year later and tossed to the pigs.

So, back to my little freezer, which seems to be filled with blueberries, blackberries and raspberries from last summer. It’s so nice to be able to freeze surplus fruit, but I have a problem with using it all. I want to save it for something, I’m not sure what, so now I have to quickly use it all, to be able to put more in the freezer shortly. Unfortunately, there is no room for rhubarb. I must get this feeling of having to save stuff from Gael who saves everything!!! So, it’s rhubarb pies, muffins, coffeecakes and bags of rhubarb left off a friend’s houses. Then, we’ll move on to blueberry pies, muffins, coffeecakes, along with blackberry pies, muffins, coffeecakes, not to mention raspberry pies, muffins and coffeecakes. I did find a bag of currants in the bottom of the freezer that someone gave me a few years ago. They got tossed. I guess it may be time to start making jams again. It’s been a while, but if I remember correctly, I had the same problem with jams and jellies. I would save them for some reason and then end up giving a lot of the jars away. Pickles! Another thing I would save and then throw away the contents a few years later so I could use the jars to make more pickles.

Right now, I’m not even going to think about pickled beets or green beans. We’ll wait and see how many empty jars I have, come August, and worry about it then.

Editor’s notes….. I have the answer Judy, or at least an answer from a guy’s point of view. Just one of those Globe canning jars in the picture above is worth $100 to $200. You can buy a lot of canned goods at Hannafords for $100.

Ball jars, in the common green shade, a wire bale 1910 is worth $400. A cobalt blue model fetches $10,000 or more.

Mason, Kerr, Hero, Atlas, Columbia, Bartow and Willoughby Stopple are names of others. Is there a VAE member out there who collects canning jars? How about giving us more information.