One of our sweet potato plants started blooming last week, clearly illustrating the plant's relationship to morning glories.  I'd never seen sweet potato flowers before, so I poked around on the web to see if I should cut off the blooms the way you do with garlic.

It turns out that sweet potato flowers are extremely unusual, and are actually in pretty high demand.  Since sweet potatoes are propagated vegetatively, it's hard to develop new varieties.  Blooms add an element of randomness to the plant's reproduction --- a lot of the seeds will probably turn into shoddy or mediocre plants, but one of the seeds might just turn out to be the next best thing in sweet potato land.

Scientists have tried a lot of tricks to get sweet potatoes to flower, and one of the most effective seems to be high humidity combined with damp soil.  Check!  Another method they've tried involves clipping off the ends of sweet potato vines, hoping to stimulate apical bud growth.  Since the deer got in and nibbled our sweet potatoes once before we added a deer deterrent to that part of the garden, we accidentally used that method too.

I plan to collect the seeds from our sweet potato flowers and give them a shot next year.  Maybe we'll develop a new variety of sweet potato and name it after Huckleberry!

Shame-faced plug: To me, the best part of the Avian Aqua Miser is that it's an automatic chicken waterer.  If you put a couple in a small tractor, you won't have to worry about water for days on end.