Progress in Preservation

My biggest goal in beginning this journey into (aspects of) self-sufficiency has been to learn pickling and preserving. It's one thing to pick some tomatoes from the garden and make yourself a salad but entirely another to process the things you've grown and then put them aside for another day. It still seems to odd to me that I can just make something like jam or chutney or sauce - could I be any more a product of my modern upbringing?! - but the idea of actually doing that remains incredibly exciting. And now that I've tried my hand at a few of these I'm ready to show some of it off.

Could I have staged this shot better so there wasn't laundry and cold medicine in it? Yes, I really could have!