While I’m working hard to fill up my supply of canning jars, I remembered a tip someone posted somewhere that I thought that was pretty brilliant so I thought I’d share.

Now since I’m not pressure canning or water bath canning, at least not right now, I do need to sterilize my jars before filling them with my dehydrated foods.

My dishwasher has a “sterilize” feature which makes it easy to do them all at once so I did that and while I waited, I threw together this cowboy stew for the crockpot and started some fresh bread in the bread machine…

Yum.

That didn’t take long so I peeled six extra potatoes, sliced them and put them into the dehydrator. Then I vacuumed, watered all my seedlings, did a load of laundry, watched some YouTube videos and took a nap with the pups.

Finally, the dishwasher was finished! My mason jars were ready. Almost.

Instead of just drying them and putting them away, I rinsed them out really good and then filled them back up with boiling water…

I also threw the lids into a clean pan and poured some of the extra water over them, too.

Why in the world would I do that?

Well, for one, to rinse any residue of the dishwashing soap off since my mast cells don’t like that (I do that with everything) and to keep the lids sterile while I filled the jars. Also because now not only do I have nice, clean, sterile jars to use later but I also have that much more nice, clean drinking water stored away in case of an emergency!

By the time I’m done, I’ll have quite a lot of water stored in these jars to go with my bigger fresh water cubes and even bigger rainwater storage tank outside.

I also bought some of those Lifestraws and a gravity water filtration unit, just as backups, so I think we’ll be set for emergency water if we ever need it.

As I said, I don’t quite remember where I got this tip from, but I’m sure glad I remembered it when it came time to sterilize my new mason jars so I thought I’d pass it along. 🙂