Q: If I boil collards in salted water for three hours, can I reduce the pressure canning time to forty minutes?

A: I’m not a food preservation expert but I spent many childhood hours helping my mother can hundreds of pints of vegetables. Dr. Elizabeth Andress is a food preservation specialist at UGA and she notes that stovetop cooking temperatures are not high enough for a long enough period of time to kill all the bacteria in home-canned vegetables. For safety, collards and other greens need to be heated to 240 degrees for 70 minutes in pint jar containers. The University of Georgia offers a series of free food preservation booklets at http://bit.ly/foodpres. They cover drying, freezing, canning and pickling your garden produce in easy-to-understand language.