Glut Rescue Planner

Pick the crop you have too much of and how many kilograms, and see the best ways to freeze, bottle, pickle, ferment, dry, store or share it, with jar counts, hands-on time and links to the how-to and recipe.

Gluts happen to everyone who grows food: forty zucchini in a week, a tree of plums all ripe on the same weekend, a whole bed of cabbages that heads up at once. The skill is not working harder, it is matching the crop to the method that suits it, then splitting the pile so you do not spend three days on one job. Pick the crop, enter the weight, and the planner ranks your options, tells you how many jars or bags to expect, and links to the how-to guide and recipe.

Glut Rescue Planner

Choose the gear you actually own and the list adjusts. Yields and times are typical home-kitchen figures, not guarantees: your recipe, variety and jar size will move them. Low-acid foods such as beans, corn and most vegetables must be pressure canned, or frozen, fermented or pickled with a tested recipe. Never water-bath can them.

Planning the pantry rather than rescuing it? Try the Pantry Inventory Planner, or see what is ready now in the Harvest Calendar.

How the Ranking Works

Each crop has a short list of methods rated for how well they suit it. Tomatoes love bottling, zucchini freezes grated, cabbage becomes sauerkraut, onions and pumpkins simply store. The planner shows the best fit first, or the quickest if you choose that, and drops any method that needs gear you do not have. It then splits the harvest across your top methods, about half to the best, a third to the second and the rest to the third, because a mix is faster to finish and leaves you with a varied pantry.

Jar and bag counts come from typical packing: how many kilograms of the raw crop it takes to fill a jar, once trimmed and cooked down. Active time is hands-on time only, not waiting for jars to process or fruit to dry. Allow extra for the first batch.

Food Safety First

Acidity decides how a food can be bottled. High-acid foods such as most fruit, tomatoes with added acid, and vinegar pickles can be water-bath processed. Low-acid foods, including beans, corn, pumpkin, carrots and most other vegetables, need a pressure canner, or should be frozen, fermented or pickled with a tested recipe. Use a recipe from a reliable source, new lids and clean jars, and discard anything that has bulging lids, leaks, mould or an off smell. Our bottling guide covers the process step by step.