Last year in 2021 the first class we held post-COVID was a food preservation class.  We are so happy to be able to host another food preservation class here at the Martin County Cooperative Extension Office for our Grow Appalachia participants.  These smiling faces were eager to attend and learn the basics of food preservation.  Today they did pressure cooking with green beans and hot water bath with making salsa.  Each participant was given instructions, powerpoints, and handouts along with a binder from UK on food preservation.  Each participant also walked away with a magnetic jar lid device.  One lucky participant won a pressure canner.  While several of the participants were seasoned veterans on food preservation, they all expressed the desire to learn more and indeed said they did learn a lot from today’s lesson.  The class was taught by Andrea Slone, Family Consumer Sciences Extension Agent from Floyd County, Ky. as our agent hasn’t been trained yet.  Andrea has been so gracious to do this 2 years in a row for us.

While most of our gardeners are just now starting to reap the benefit of all their hard work with some of the early crops, we provided the participants with green beans as well as all the ingredients to make a salsa.  Each participant was able to can 1 jar of each item, which they can come back and pick up to take home with them.  We will be holding another food preservation class later this month and it also has 15 participants registered for it as well.  We had 7 of the participants out of the 15 registered attend today.