Saturday, September 26, 2020

Canning the Harvest

Tomato Bob has been enjoying a bountiful harvest. The dilemma is, he has more tomatoes than he can eat right now and he would like to continue to enjoy them through the long cold winter months. He was watching one of the PBS cooking shows and they explained how to preserve tomatoes by canning. Following the instructions, he started first with making tomato sauce. Having been successful with that, he experimented with canning his tomatoes whole without cooking them. By some miracle he managed to get that to work. According to Tomato Bob, he is using a proprietary vacuum seal canning system he invented.

One problem all of us critters have had to face for many years is that our sunflower seeds and acorns we store in our burrows during the winter get a bit stale. Eating stale seeds makes you feel like you have returned to the cave-munk era. Millions of seeds have been spent on developing high-tech environmental control systems for seed store units. The results have been sadly very disappointing.

Fresh from the success of preserving whole tomatoes with his vacuum seal system, Tomato Bob tackled the stale seed challenge. However, his efforts were hampered by the bottomless seed jar conundrum. Exasperated, he turned to myself and Vinnie to help he solved this riddle. No matter how many sunflower seeds he put in the glass jar, he could never fill it to the top

I think Tomato Bob’s ancestors came from Italy. He has the strangest taste buds for a chipmunk: tomatoes, pasta sauce, and he is even drying his own parsley for pizza. Did I mention he has his own brick pizza oven?

Tomato Bob is very proud of his vacuum seal system for preserving whole tomatoes without cooking.

Moving these jars around proved to be a bit more of a workout than he had anticipated.

He also grows squash but not for the seeds. He likes to make squash pies. I am beginning to think he was raised by humans rather than ‘munks.

His buttercup squash took first prize at the human’s county fair. (Lets just say that it didn’t go over well with the human farmers.)

He kept trying to fill a jar to the top with sunflower seeds but for some reason, each time he came with a new load of seeds he couldn’t fill it.

He was completely baffled. He checked the jar but couldn’t find any holes in it
 

With Vinnie’s help, I setup a network of spy cameras with motion sensors. Here I am testing the cameras. I tried my best to sneak up without being detected but I was caught! The system is foolproof.

Our thief anticipated our spy cameras. Apparently using fishing line as a lasso he tipped over the jar. The cameras then caught this shadowy figure. This ‘munk was checking to see if the anyone heard the dull thud as the jar hit the ground.

While using the shadow to hide his identity, he stuffed his pouches full of seeds before sneaking off. Vinnie offered try to enhance the photos and use advance facial recognition to identify our suspect. I told him not to bother.There is only one ‘munk clever enough to pull off such a brilliant seed heist. … The Phantom Chipmunk has struck again.

 

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