Frugal Kitchens 101 - Labeling Home Preserved Foods

Home preserved foods need to be labeled and there are many ways of doing this depending on how the food is to be stored.  Many home canners either buy or print off custom made labels for their home canned foods but the logistics of this is not very practical when doing larger scale canning.  Labels add to the cost of home preserved products and in my opinion an unnecessary cost.  Besides most labels are a pain to get off the jars.  They have to be soaked off or they will gunk up your dishwasher.  However it is still important to label the food and date it was preserved when storing.  This week's Frugal Kitchens 101 discusses how I label foods for storage.

• home canned foods using single use metal snap lids - I use a Sharpie to write directly on the lid.  It is simple and effective.
• home canned foods using reusable canning lids - A Sharpie leaves a ghost mark on the lids so I don't want to use that since these lids will be around for a couple of decades.  I started off writing directly on the jar with a Sharpie but have since changed to using painter's tape.  It's a cheap solution.
• home canned foods stored in boxes - I rotate my home canned foods so quite often it is stored in the cardboard boxes the jars originally came in.  Once I'm out of a row of food on the shelves the food in the boxes is moved to the shelves to replenish the supply.  I label the boxes using painter's tape and a Sharpie.  I include the content, number of jars of each content and year.  I can quickly glance at a box and know when the food should be used up by.  While home canned foods keep much longer that the USDA recommended 1 year they will lose a bit nutritionally so my comfort level hovers at the 2 year mark.  
• home frozen foods - Our bulk meat purchases come labeled with a stamp from the abattoir's so unless I buy meats from a grocery store I really don't have to worry about labeling.  Any commercially frozen foods is already labeled.  I use a Sharpie to label contents and date for anything I put into vacuum sealed bags or containers.  
• home dried and bulk dried foods - I store home dried and bulk dried food (eg. rices, pastas, etc.) in glass mason, commercial glass jars and occasionally commercial plastic jars.  I use a Sharpie to label these containers directly on the jar.