Mel Jeffreys

A Beginners Guide to Home Canning & Food Preserving: Recipes, Jams, Marmalades, Jellies, Chutneys, Relishes Plus More... by Mel Jeffreys
TOC starts where recipes are broken up into food categories.
Preface about canning from the authors point of view. Intro discusses a bit more about canning.
How it all began, different methods, safety, tools and equipment. Canning and methods most used by others are explained.
Water bath is also explained along with charts of foods you can preserve that way.
Pressure cooking canning is another way along with chart altitude adjustments. along with foods you can preserve this way.
Preserves has its own charts of fruits that you can preserve. Recipes are sometimes confusing as they don't give you the ratio fo sugar to add to amount of water to make a syrup to preserve the berries. Recipes do not start at top of new page.
Few contain a picture.
I remember doing all the methods when I was younger. Some recipes take a LOT of ingredients, be sure to have them all first before you start.
Some have many steps to follow, time consuming.… (mehr)

I consider myself an avid vegetable gardener, but I've only had a garden two years so I'm definitely still in the beginner camp. I've been reading a lot about it, but I've learned the most just from talking to other gardeners. My boss has had a huge, successful garden for most of 30 years, and he's taught me the post, and he was teaching me about companion planting before I had ever heard of the term or knew what it meant.

This book is really rather basic, doesn't present anything that hasn't been mentioned before, and the drawings/illustrations are so tiny as to be useless (I looked on kindle keyboard & on my kindle nook app, which is in color). If you try to enlarge the screen (which I did) the drawings end up blurry.

The only "good" thing about this book is its length - and the reason why I gave this 3 stars. The book is very short, but it makes it very easy for you to find the information you are looking for. If you are about to plant peas, for example, and you can't remember what to plant with it or what not to plant with it, it's easy enough to find that section in the book.

The other good thing is the author does talk about what flowering plants are good for your garden - something I attempted to do last year, but all my flowers died, defeating the purpose.

I got this book on amazon when it was listed for free.… (mehr)