Squirrel War Part Deux: Tomato Fight

When we last left our heroine (that's me), she was lamenting the sorry state of affairs in her backyard, as the bird feeder was regularly ravaged by pillaging squirrels.  How unfortunate, you might have thought.  But at least it's just a bird feeder - at least they're leaving the garden alone.

They heard you.  Or maybe they heard me.  Or perhaps the little bastards are just evil, because as mentioned in this post, they started going after our precious tomatoes.  Day after day (or night after night, I'm really not sure), they scaled the seven-foot garden fence, waltzed into the tomato bed, and plucked tomato after tomato from the vine.  They took a bite or two and then chucked it on the ground like the vermin they are.  If they didn't pull them down, they gnawed them on the vine.  The stupid creatures can't even remember that they don't actually like tomatoes long enough to leave them alone.  I estimate that we lost at least 1/3 of our tomatoes.  Protective mesh did not stop them.  We were approaching our wits' end.

So my determined husband took matters into his own hands and built a tomato cage.  A gigantic box of wood and chicken wire designed to keep even the most pesky squirrel out.  It's built in sections; on the long sides the top sections are hinged for access, and on the short sides the bottom sections are hinged.  Makes harvesting a bit tricky, especially since the far side is very close to the garden fence, but it's working!  The tomatoes are making a comeback....only to be sucked on by stinkbugs.  But those are much easier to kill, and thankfully Home Depot sells stinkbug traps that actually work.

The only good stinkbug is a dead stinkbug.

Cherry tomatoes are just gorgeous things.

So what are we going with these newly-salvaged tomatoes, you ask?  How about pasta sauce?  Yesterday Nick and I picked about five pounds of tomatoes (see photo); this sounds like a lot, but when you're cooking them down, it's not much.  Most recipes call for 30 to 60 pounds of tomatoes.  We found a recipe calling for 25 and decided to halve it, so we supplemented our tomatoes with eight pounds more from the farm market.

The tomatoes were blanched, peeled, and quartered, and then cooked down with finely chopped onions, green bell peppers (my mother will be appalled), tomato paste, and several spices, including homegrown basil .  After over four hours of simmering, we canned a delicious, slightly spicy pasta sauce at about 11:00 PM last night.  Our 12.5 pounds yielded about four-and-a-half quarts - not bad for our first attempt of the year!

Perrin-cat is unimpressed by the pasta sauce.