Sweet potato variety 'Evangeline'

This is the second year that we have let 'Evangeline,' a sweet potato variety developed at Louisiana State University, essentially take over our garden during the hot summer months.  Actually, I don't mind having a garden crop that essentially does its own thing with very little effort on my part.  It literally filled up the garden from two little plants that survived through the extra cold winter we had.  Evangeline is quite attractive, with its unusual purple pigmented leaves, and colorful flowers.  It is also sweeter than earlier bred sweet potato varieties.  Sweet potato is related to the infamous morning glory weed, so it is not surprising that it has the ability to cover such a large ground area in a short time.  In late September, we expect to dig out another bumper crop of sweet potatoes.  This is about as good a garden crop as there is from the perspective of minimum input and maximum output.  The variety name, Evangeline, hearkens back to the poem by the same name, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and has a special connection to Louisiana, as explained in the Wikipedia article about the poem.

In the upper picture, you might have noticed that I have a row of beans, actually edible soybeans on the right side of the garden which the sweet potato vines are beginning to take over.  I will probably get my cane knife out, sharpen it, and do a quick slash cut down the row between the sweet potatoes and the soybeans.  I may have to do this a couple more times until the soybeans are mature enough to eat.  I wish I had planted a few more soybeans, now that I know they can be productive in Louisiana's intense summer heat.