1 Potato, 2 Potato, 3 Potato, 4...

It's harvest time here in Rocky Mount, and today the kids and I got to do something really cool!  Last night at church, a family invited us to get up and go out this morning on a sweet-potato-pickin' with them.  Since I'm still learning to speak Eastern North Carolinian, the first thing that came to my mind was a pig-pickin', and I couldn't imagine why we would want to cook sweet potatoes on a smoker and eat them with barbeque sauce. Ha!  But apparently, a sweet-potato-pickin' is when you go out and glean sweet potatoes after the soil has been turned over.  It works like this...Sweet potato farmers harvest their potatoes in the fall.  But there are so many potatoes underground that they can't really get them all, and some are too small to be marketable.  So once the farmers have finished working their land, they let whomever wants to come and dig-up and keep whatever potatoes they find (although you aren't allowed to sell them).  It's free!  How nice is that?! To the farmer who let us glean his field today, THANK YOU!!!!!!

Sometimes the potatoes are just laying ontop of the ground, like this:

But at other times, you have to dig for them, like this: 

Since the field we were gleaning had already been picked-over some, many of the potatoes were small.  But some were huge! (That's my hand.)

The most fun part of all was that we were allowed to take our shoes off and get as dirty as we wanted.

I want to give a huge thank you to my friend Renee for inviting us to pick sweet potatoes with her.  She and I joked that we were "getting our Ruth and Naomi on."

And this is what a 6-year-old looks like after she's spent the morning working the fields...

 How great is our God to provide for His people so abundantly!!!

"So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow."  (1 Corinthians 3:7, NIV)

What we learned today:

1.  Smaller potatoes are sometimes the sweetest. 

2.  You can't plant sweet potatoes two years consecutively in the same field.  (This field grew peanuts last year, so we would occasionally find peanuts growing in the soil.)

3.  People love to eat sweet potatoes.  Gnats love to eat sweet potato pickers.  

4.  Farmers are very generous.

5.  Rolling around in dirt and digging for stuff is incredibly therapeutic and relaxing.

6.  A field that looks empty and barren sometimes holds great treasure under it.

7.  Hard work can be a lot of fun and very rewarding.

8.  Eastern North Carolina rocks! (But I've been figuring that out for about 4 months.  :D)

Ooh! And one more that I just learned... North Carolina is the number one producer of sweet potatoes in the U.S., and Eastern North Carolina is where most of them come from.  How exciting is that?!

So now I'm off to go bake some sweet potatoes.

 And make them into fries....

And casseroles...

And stews...  

And breads....  

And pies....