Creative Canning | May 2025
Late Spring Canning Recipes
May is a season of overlap, where spring’s wild harvest meets the first flush of early summer produce. From strawberry jam to pickled fiddleheads, it’s the perfect time to fill your pantry with fresh spring flavors.
May Canning Recipes
May is a month of transitions in the canning kitchen. We’re still harvesting the last of spring’s wild edibles—like fiddleheads, ramps, and dandelions—but we’re also starting to see local spring produce trickle in.
Grocery store bins are full of affordable strawberries, and farmers’ markets begin to offer tender vegetables like zucchini, peas, and asparagus. It’s a time for both wild harvests and early garden abundance, and that makes for some especially exciting preserving projects.
Whether you’re putting up pie fillings, trying a savory flower jelly, or pressure canning meals for the pantry, May offers a little bit of everything.
Late Spring Fruit Canning Recipes
Strawberries and rhubarb are the stars of late spring, and now’s the time to stock up. These two pair beautifully in recipes, but each also shines on its own. Canning pie fillings this time of year means you’ll be thanking yourself when winter rolls around and there’s dessert waiting on the shelf.
Late Spring Jams and Jellies
This season brings not just sweet jams, but savory and floral ones, too. Strawberry jam is the classic, of course, but May is also a good time to try out more unique creations—like chive blossom jelly or spruce tip jelly. These capture fleeting spring flavors you just can’t buy.
Old Fashioned Strawberry Jam (No added pectin)
Apple Blossom Jelly (or Cherry, Peach, Pear, etc.)
Late Spring Pickling Recipes
The earliest pickling of the season is all about crisp stalks and foraged greens. Pickled asparagus is a perennial favorite, and wild-harvested ramps or onions preserved in vinegar are pantry treasures. If you haven't tried pickled fiddleheads yet, now’s your chance.
Pickled Ramps (Wild Leeks)
Pickled Onions (Three Ways)
Pickled Green Coriander Seed (Unripe Cilantro Seeds)
Pickled Dilly Beans (Dill Pickled Green Beans)
Late Spring Vegetable Canning Recipes
As the ground thaws and gardens wake up, we get a short window to can tender spring vegetables. These are great pantry basics that are surprisingly quick to prepare—just blanch, pack, and process. May is one of the best months for pressure canning fresh vegetables before the full bounty of summer sets in.
And a new one, Canning French Fries! These came out so good, and they fry up beautifully. They’re just pre-soaked raw pack potatoes, but putting them up ahead of time means you can pop out a quick batch of fries for a weeknight burger night, no sweat!
Late Spring Meal in a Jar Canning Recipes
Spring soups, pot pies, and pantry-ready comfort food—these recipes use what’s in season now but keep you fed all year long. Those onions starting to sprout in your pantry this time of year make a darn good French Onion Soup!
If there’s a seasonal canning recipe you’ve been hunting for—or if you’re working with an ingredient that’s new to you—just reply to this newsletter and let me know. I’m always happy to help track down a safe, tested recipe.
Happy Canning!
-Ashley at Creative Canning
(Ps. I also run the blog Practical Self Reliance, which has information on all manner of food preservation techniques (cheesemaking, salt curing, winemaking) as well as just about everything else you’d need to learn to be self-reliant in this modern world. It has its own substack as well, and you can subscribe to practical self-reliance separately as well. That newsletter comes out weekly and covers canning, as well as everything else.)
So many great ideas!
I love this list! I never think of canning peas or carrots for some reason. I need to get on that! 🫛