I always liked to watch Grandma work with the vegetables we harvested. She would take her canning jars, wash them out, and put them in pots of boiling water for a while to sterilize them. She would chop the ends off the cucumbers and split each one into four long slices. After the cans came off the stove, she would stuff the cucumber slices into the jars as much as she could and pour in the mixture of vinegar she had prepared. She would screw the seal on with a lid and sit it aside to go on to finish the rest of the cans. I remember asking her what the popping noise was in the jars. She would always tell me it was the canning jars sealing themselves.
Grandma would do the same thing with tomatoes when she canned tomatoes and tomato juice. The only difference is that she would leave the peals on the cucumbers but remove all the tomato skin and some of the cores before she canned them. I don’t recall her ever preserving any melons though. I know she would cut squash up and freeze it, as she would also can green beans, freeze corn on the cob, and the potatoes would be stored down in the basement in huge open wire crates. The floors down there were dirt and cool, therefore, it preserved the potatoes. We had potatoes all the way up until planting time in the spring.