Food preservation continues to be a popular topic and community members want to learn how to do it. Cooperative Extension is all about education and direct learning to teach our communities how to do things, especially food preservation, correctly.

The past eight months the Daviess County Family and Consumer Sciences Extension Agent has held a series of food preservation classes with an average group of 4-8 community members. The Daviess County FCS agent also took this opportunity for newer FCS agents in the area to observe and help teach.

The first class (which had first time extension program attendees) was held at the White Chateau venue out in Daviess County. The group started with a Basics of Food Preservation class, going over the equipment and two research based methods of food preservation, boiling water bath canning and pressure canning. According to evaluations from this class, the participants had a desire to learn more about food preservation including hands on workshops. They were all beginner canners, wanting to learn how to preserve food, create a sense of accomplishment, plan to use skills to save money and to have the opportunity to interact with others.

Following that class, the group attended a hands-on Boiling Water Bath canning workshop at the Daviess County Extension Office. This group preserved apple pie filling, using the correct method and tools. A second group (from Habitat for Humanity) heard about the food preservation class and requested a class. This group had a basics of canning class and partial hands-on workshop to preserve Lemon Blueberry Jam using the boiling water bath canning method. The participants were also all beginners wanting to learn about food preservation and ways to save money by doing so.

The next hands-on workshop was Pressure Canning. The group reviewed the basics of food preservation before getting a hands-on experience using a Pressure canner to preserve green beans. This group requested another class to preserve jam; they reviewed the basics of food preservation and were more comfortable at this workshop using the boiling water method again and preserving jars of strawberry jam.

The hands-on workshops were kept small due to size of the kitchen and there was more opportunity for all to be involved directly learning food preservation skills and being comfortable enough to ask questions throughout the classes. All participants received the booklet of all University of Kentucky extension food preservation publications.

 Comments from the classes were: "I feel so much more comfortable and capable of doing this at home" I have shared this information with my friends"