Corrections Policy

Food-safety errors on this site are treated as urgent. If a processing time, headspace value, acid addition, or safety claim is wrong, we want to know — and we will fix it, note it visibly on the affected page, and update our records.

What we correct

We correct any verifiable factual error, including:

• Processing times and headspace values — the most safety-critical content on this site. If a time or headspace we published does not match Bernardin's current guidance, that is an urgent correction.
• Acidity and pH claims — e.g. stating a food is safe to water-bath can when it is not, or overstating or understating the role of bottled lemon juice or citric acid.
• Altitude band figures — city elevations cited from Statistics Canada or Bernardin's Canadian metric bands.
• Jar sizes and equipment specifications — Bernardin sizes (125 mL, 250 mL, 500 mL, 1 L) and any other verifiable product detail.
• Attribution and sourcing errors — a claim we credited to a source that doesn't say what we said it says.

We also correct significant errors of fact that, while not food-safety critical, could mislead a reader — wrong agricultural statistics, wrong province for a regulation, etc.

What we don't alter

• Style, tone, or phrasing preferences (unless they caused a factual misreading).
• Publication dates — we don't backdate posts or remove original publish timestamps.
• Honest opinions and editorial judgements (e.g. "this canner is the better value for most Canadians") — these may be updated as new products ship, but the original recommendation is not silently removed.

How we label corrections

For food-safety corrections (processing times, headspace, acid addition, pH): we add a visible dated note on the affected page, beside the claim it corrects rather than at the top, stating what changed and what it changed from. Putting it next to the figure is deliberate: a reader who has come for that one number meets the correction where the old number used to be. The corrected content is sourced to the Bernardin edition or Health Canada document that supports it.

For non-safety factual errors: we update the content and add a brief correction note at the bottom of the article, or — if the error was minor (a typo in a non-critical number, a wrong city name) — a dated editor's note inline.

Site-wide corrections

A claim that sat in a shared component or string rather than on one page cannot be corrected page by page, so it is corrected here.

• 20 September 2026 — the “testing kitchen” sentence. A testing kitchen was something we intended to set up, and the affiliate sentence in the footer of every page — that purchases “help fund our testing kitchen” — was written ahead of it. It never happened. Now that it is clear it is not going to, that sentence has been removed, along with the same wording on the About and Affiliate Disclosure pages and a site tagline that described the methods as “tested”, which read as tested by us. No product and no recipe on this site has been hands-on tested by us. What we do instead is read the Canadian sources — Bernardin, Health Canada, and the provincial health authorities — and report them accurately, including when the honest answer is that none of them covers a question. No processing time, headspace value, pH or other figure is affected: none of them ever depended on a kitchen of ours.
• 20 September 2026 — the “every factual claim traces to a source” promise. This site said, in four places, that everything on it already traced to a Canadian authority. The About page said “Every factual claim on the Site traces back to a Canadian-respected source.” The How we source page said every recipe, processing time, headspace and pH value “traces to a tested Canadian authority, or it doesn’t go on the page”, and said the same in its search-result description. The structured data on 552 pages — the machine-readable block that tells a search engine who publishes this site — said “Every processing time is verified against a Canadian authority before publication.” That overstated what we had checked. Reading this site page by page keeps turning up figures that did not meet it: a pH figure that was ours rather than a source’s, authorities named with nothing published behind them, keeping times no authority we can reach publishes. Every one we find is corrected. The promise implied there were none left to find, and we could not know that. The processing-time claim was the furthest from true. Of 111 canning guides here, 52 deliberately send you to your own Bernardin edition for the exact minutes instead of printing a number — which this site explains on the How we source page, under “Why we defer the exact minutes to Bernardin”. A figure we defer is not a figure we verified. Those four places now say what we actually do: we cite the source and name the page number or the URL, we say plainly when a figure is ours rather than a source’s, we say when no source we can reach publishes an answer, and we defer to the tested recipe in front of you when the figure is not ours to print. You can check any of those on the page you are reading. You could not check the old promise at all. If you trusted a number here because of that promise, check it against the source we cite — the page number or the URL is on the page with it. No processing time, headspace, pH or altitude band changed today. What changed is that we no longer claim more checking than we have done, and errors we find are corrected under this policy and dated where they were.
• 20 September 2026 — the ranked botulism risk table. Our botulism guide carried a section headed “Risk levels by preservation method”, in English and French: eight preservation methods numbered from highest risk to lowest, each with a case-frequency label — “multiple cases yearly”, “periodic cases”, “rare”, “no documented cases”. No authority publishes that ranking, and no authority publishes those frequencies. We searched the three sources that page cites and can still reach — Public Health Ontario’s 2014 home-canning review, the BC Centre for Disease Control’s botulism page, and its Fermented Vegetables guidance — and not one of them ranks methods against each other or attaches a case frequency to any of them. The order and the eight labels were ours. “Multiple cases yearly” was the furthest from anything published. The only Canadian figure we hold is the Public Health Agency of Canada’s: 55 outbreaks of foodborne botulism in Canada between 2006 and 2021 — outbreaks rather than cases, across sixteen years, and not broken down by preserving method. A ranked list with case frequencies reads as surveillance data rather than as our opinion, and that is the harm here. The rows most likely to have been acted on are the bottom ones. A reader who took “refrigerator pickles — very low risk — rare” as a published finding was given a reason to relax about the acid in a refrigerator pickle, when the acid is the only thing protecting it; the same goes for reading “freezing — essentially zero risk” as a reason to relax about a thawed jar. The safety points underneath the ranking were real and are still on the page, in a section headed Where the risk actually sits, each with the source that carries it and no ordering. Nothing about pressure canning, water-bath canning, acidification or the 4 °C to 50 °C growth range changed.

How to report an error

Email hi@harvestguide.ca with the subject line Correction: [page title]. Include:

• The URL of the affected page.
• The specific claim you believe is wrong.
• The source you're comparing against (Bernardin edition, Health Canada document URL, or equivalent Canadian authority).

We review every correction report. If the error is confirmed, we aim to publish a fix within 48 hours for food-safety issues and within two weeks for other factual errors.

Page-level corrections are noted on the affected pages rather than collected in a log; corrections to a shared component or string are listed above. If you reported an error and would like confirmation that it was addressed, reply to your original email.

Our sourcing standard

The reason this policy can be specific is that our sourcing standard is specific. Every processing time and headspace value on this site must trace to Bernardin — the Complete Book of Home Preserving (ISBN 978-0-7788-0137-5) or bernardin.ca. Health Canada publishes the rule to use a tested recipe, not the figures. We do not paraphrase US sources (USDA, NCHFP) as primary authority — our audience is Canadian, altitude tables are Canadian, and jar sizes are metric. If you believe a number we've published doesn't match Bernardin's current guidance, that is exactly the kind of correction we want to hear about.

See the About page for the full authority-sources list.