From Dragonflies to Sweet Potato Pies

Yesterday afternoon I walked outside just to take in the beautiful fall weather.  Summer in South Louisiana seems to go on for most of the year, so when the few days of Fall and Spring appear, we get out and enjoy them!  I ran across a gazillion dragonflies flying around, lighting on the barbed wire fence and different plants and snapped a few pictures.  You can see in the photo below how intricately detailed the Creator has designed the dragonfly's wings.  Pretty neat.


Here is a greenish colored one

I always called them "mosquito hawks" growing up.  Turns out it is for good reason they're called this.

Here's one with a reddish hue

According to Wikipedia,  dragonflies are very important predators that eat a lot of mosquitoes.  (Where were all y'all when we really needed ya this summer?!)  They can fly up to 34 miles an hour.  Wow!  They are actually aquatic for most of their lives in the nymph form and swim around eating mosquito larvae in ponds, ditches, and rice fields. 

An interesting thing I learned from Wikipedia is that in Europe, dragonflies have often been seen as sinister. They are sometimes called a devil's darning needle and are linked with snakes.  Supposedly, although I've never heard this and I live in the South, they are sometimes referred to as snake doctors because of a Southern old saying that dragonflies follow snakes around and stitch them back together if they are injured.  That's not true, of course, and if it were, I wish they'd spend more time eating mosquitoes instead of stitching up snakes!

Speaking of snakes, this little harmless guy, a garter snake, had somehow gotten himself trapped in the rain barrel.  I let him out and he slithered away slowly.  The colder weather had him moving in slow motion. 


Garter snake

While we're talking about things in slow motion, the sweet potato harvest continues.  Each day I try to dig a few more sweet potatoes, but with the days getting shorter, I don't have much time to get it done.
   

A shovel and a bucket of sweet potatoes

I have a plot of garden area about 30 feet by 10 feet left to dig.  You can see how dry the ground is in the plot to the left that I've just dug up.


Just a little bit left to dig

As I dig them, I hang them in an onion sack outside in a tree or in the garage to cure so that they are sweeter.  As discussed earlier, curing helps trigger sugar creating enzymes.  Once they've cured for a few weeks, we bring them inside to the pantry and to ultimately eat them.  Talk about good.  I know you can't get a good perspective on size, but some of the sweet potatoes in that sack measure as long as 18 inches long!  Crazy.


Curing Sweet Potatoes

Tricia has been baking some of the sweet potatoes to eat for supper.  She'll also make empanadas (sweet potato pies) for dessert.  That is some good eatin'.