I'm happy to hear you are cherishing those sweet potatoes!
I went to war with the... ooh, let's foreshadow!
Oooooh okay fancy story time.
Once upon a time, before my mother in law lived in her house which we now have a nice vegetable garden & where a ton of our potted plants live, the very nice neighbor lady who lived next door to the old man who used to live there was very sad.
The very nice neighbor lady was very sad because the old man who lived next to her didn't have any plants or flowers in his backyard. She thought that was boring, and thought she knew what she could do to spice things up for the old man.
So she unleashed a pretty plague over the fence into the old man's yard in an attempt to entertain herself and the people around her???
That pretty plague was called morning glories.
When I met my mother in law and her morning glories, because she... trellised them, watered them, and allowed them to crawl over every surface and everything she owned... because of how my mother in law treated the morning glories I thought she had chosen the flowers on purpose? And I liked it. I really liked it when I thought it was how she wanted her outdoor area......!?!?!?!
But after seeing uhm...
Oh my gosh. There is an area that gets fed clean water from our garden sink??? I had no idea the water drained behind the sink. I just learned this like yesterday, hah. So..
The water drained behind the sink onto the ground which is dirt between the fence and the sink structure, which was next to the gazebo which is a big metal structure with a cover over it... which was where the nice neighbor lady threw the morning glories originally...
I had no idea that the sink had been feeding the morning glories!!!!
When I told my boyfriend that his mother's garden sink drained onto the ground behind the sink his eyes bugged out!!! "We've been wasting water all this time???"
The upside to this is that *directly* next to the garden sink in its shade we have a looooooovely chocolate mint patch that has also been fed from the sink. (Sue has known for the last few years that her sink drained into the garden so she hasn't been using any yucky stuff down the drain, and I don't use any yucky stuff, and I made an assumption without asking where it drained, so no harm I guess!)
But I wasted so much water watering a plague of morning glories and weeds last year I can't believe it.
I always neglected weeding that part of the garden, like, no big deal, it'll be there when I get there
I had no idea it was being fed all the water in the world. (Not that we excessively waste water but hey we could have used it to grow stuff had I known it was not going down a drain to a sewer or whatever.)
My final straw in declaring war was uhm, Sue isn't currently well enough to get rid of the morning glory corpse onslaught every year. They make such a mess and crawl over everywhere then die and crumble and seed a big mess and a bigger mess for next year, it's a terrible ordeal if you aren't entirely well.
Last year she made a trellis for them to grow onto the gazebo... and they did... we ended up with like 3 feet thick of morning glories over everything.
If I had known that this hadn't been her grand vision she orchestrated on purpose at the time, I would have 100% saved the plants in the gazebo before they got buried?
There was this one succulent plant in the corner last year... thank goodness some of those succulents are so hardy they can survive most things???? This plant was beneath morning glories for at least 5 months, like in a black out...
When I cut the morning glories away from it, the parts of the leaves that were supposed to be black colored from direct sunlight were anemic green from lack of sunlight and it looked a mess. It fully recovered, and while rescuing it from the morning horror glories I accidentally broke quite a few branches off into new plants... then got a succulent cutting starting mania fever and probably made uhm at least 20 new plants from that big one. We gave like 8 away to friends at a party, yay!
Anyway, my final straw was... in November/the fall...
I cut away at least 60 pounds of morning glory vines from that gazebo. No joke. It took hours.
And when I learned that wasn't even the owner of the backyard's choice to plant them, I say: no more indulging trellises. Heck NO more being irrigated by the sink!!!
I used some plastic to cover the strip of dirt between the fence, and then put some weed control fabric over it. I felt all fancy doing like official landscaping work. It was my first time laying down a liner and I kind of felt like I was making a pond
Oooh I just remembered watching my dad make a foutain with a liner in it. Haha. So that's what it felt like. I shoula taken a before and after. I always say that. I'm kicking myself mentally, like
If I were as disciplined as I should be I could have a Gardener portfolio already.
The before & after on my MIL's yard was pretty impressive. Next year/next project = I'll force myself to do before and afters.
I put some potted plants where the dirt with the weeds and morning glories were.
I look forward to doing this really great thing that I read about on HG forum to get rid of weeds/unwanted plants... where you sprout the weeds, then cover them with cardboard/an old carpet/a big board/something to block out all the sunlight, then wait until the sprouted weeds die under the cover, then lift the cover, water the ground under the weeds sprout, then cover the all again to kill them in the dark...
Yeah... that's what I really want to do. But this year, I'll settle for one round of black out and the seeds can just stay under that.
I'm all slightly paranoid they'd grow through my blockade (I know they'll grow around it through the fence and such)
Then I remember I also put plastic down
Morning glories can't grow through plastic
Morning glories can't grow through plastic
Mommy make the morning glories stop! :'(
(Haha, I'm joking, it's fine. Step one is officially just to stop indulging them.

)
And to utilize all that perfectly fine water being dumped on the ground, yes yes!
I am not sure I have the will to actually eliminate the morning glories (if only because they spread to the front yard and everywhere. Last fall there were seeds all over the ground.

)
But what I am confident I can do is prevent the morning glories from traumatizing our chosen plants too terribly! <3