The September 2026 issue of the Gather and Sow newsletter is all about apples.

Apples, those iconic harbingers of autumn, are the perfect subject for the conclusion of our summertime interrogation of the rose family (the Rosaceae). If you read our earlier newsletters featuring strawberries, brambles, and stone fruits, then our image (below) of the phylogenetic relationships among important subgroups in the Rosaceae will be familiar to you. Apples are the flagship genus (Malus) of the Maleae tribe (pronounced “mal-ee-ay”). The Maleae also includes pears, quinces, serviceberries, loquats, rowan, medlar, and hawthorns. We will obviously have to return to the Maleae in future newsletters to give all those fabulous fruits their due consideration (In the meantime, revisit Katherine’s beautiful essay “Pear grit and the art of aging”). The fruit structure of all of them is called a pome. We get poetical about pomes in Botany Lab of the Month, where we cut up apples. Before that, we talk about apple evolution in Food for Thought. We conclude, as always, with our roundup of recent media and journal articles in Gleanings and Baker’s Dozen. 

The August 2026 Gather and Sow newsletter is all about peaches and other stone fruits.

Does the summer heat have you feeling drupey? Last month we broke down brambles for you, showing that their “berries” were really aggregates of drupelets. This month in Food for Thought we take on full-sized drupes––peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots, and almonds. Yes, we know that the peak of peach season has come and gone. But now is the best time to grab the last of the market’s peaches, in anticipation of cooler days when you might appreciate a little burst of summer on your toast. We do just that in the Botany Lab of the Month, where we combine our favorite rose family drupes with fresh mint from the garden to make a jam so sweet and rich that it tastes like justice itself. Mmmmmm…peach-mint jam.

The July 2026 issue of Gather and Sow is all about brambles (genus Rubus).

This month we continue our summer romance with the rose family, specifically the cane fruits, or brambles, which include blackberries, raspberries, and their many look-alikes. These cane fruits belong to the branch of the rose family called the Rosoideae, which also includes roses and strawberries. Although these “fruits” are superficially very different, they are all built on the same basic structure: a single flower produces a great many pistils with separate ovaries, each of which becomes a fruit. The many fruits within a flower are then packaged together into a colorful flavorfest of a structure that some people, birds, and mammals like to eat. Ecologically and culinarily they function as a single fruitlike unit, and we casually call them berries (or hips, in the case of roses). But as we saw in June’s newsletter (link), strawberries are not berries at all. They are big fleshy red receptacles covered in small dry achene-type fruits. Rose hips are a bit like inside-out strawberries: their achenes are enclosed by a hollow red shell derived from the hypanthium and other floral parts. In Food for Thought: A ramble through the brambles we compare cane fruits and strawberries, which are very similar, except that cane fruits have invested their bright sweet fleshiness into their fruits instead of their receptacles. 

The brambles bring into play another prominent aspect of some of our favorite plants from the rose family: spinescence, including prickles, spines, and thorns. Each of these sharp projections is morphologically and developmentally distinct, and the rose family boasts numerous examples. We break it down in Botany Lab of the Month: Be careful. She’s sharp. 

We conclude this month’s newsletter with a selection of relevant media and journal articles in Gleanings and Baker’s Dozen.

The Gather and Sow: June 2026 issue is all about strawberries.

With so many strawberries in so many kitchens this month, now is the perfect time to merge botany lab and breakfast preparation by working through the many parts of a strawberry. We kick off the strawberry love with some explanations in Food for Thought. You can learn quite a bit about flowers by cutting up a strawberry, as we do in this month’s Botany Lab of the Month. As it turns out, this enigmatic little gem is packed with coincidences and apocrypha along with its citric acid and anthocyanins. We conclude with recent relevant media and journal articles in Gleanings and Baker’s Dozen. 

Developing coconuts, in Panama. Photo by J. Touchton

The May 2026 issue of our Gather and Sow newsletter is out.

Coconut palms grow some of the biggest seeds on the planet, and vanilla seeds, from an orchid, are among the smallest. They are both delicious! They are also the subjects of this month’s newsletter. Just in time for Mother’s Day (May 10th this year), in this month’s Food for Thought essay (“Coconuts for Mother’s Day”), we make the case that Mother’s Day celebrations should include more coconut. The large seed size of coconuts, and the small size of orchid seeds, are indicative of their respective parenting philosophy. In this month’s Botany Lab of the Month we describe coconut and vanilla fruit and seed morphology in the course of making cookies (“Extreme Monocot Cookies”). The newsletter concludes with Gleanings and Baker’s Dozen, our roundup of relevant recent media and journal articles.

The Gather and Sow: April 2026 newsletter is out, just in time for Easter. We write about betalains, the pigments that impart brilliant colors to beets and their relatives. And we dye Easter eggs with plant dyes, make violet syrup, and learn about pH.

Head over to our site Gather and Sow for the March 2026 newsletter.

We observe two holidays in this March 2026 issue of Gather and Sow: St. David’s Day (March 1st) and Women’s History Month (all of March), which coincides with International Women’s Day on March 8th. 

Leeks are a traditional symbol of St. David’s Day, and their morphology is the topic of this issue’s Food for Thought: Ay, leeks is good!

Women’s history month is a time to recognize the contributions of women to American history, society, and culture. Too often women’s accomplishments have gone unsung. The same is true for the “female” parts of flowers. We rectify this by celebrating extraordinary flower parts in corn and the saffron crocus. All celebrations deserve cake, and we offer a recipe for one that combines corn and saffron in this month’s Botany Lab of the Month: Honoring female (plant) anatomy with saffron polenta cake.

We conclude with research and media highlights in Baker’s Dozen and Gleanings. Alongside several recent research articles, we have included a few classic papers by two matriarchs of plant biology, Katherine Esau and Barbara McClintock, in honor of Women’s History Month.

The Botanist in the Kitchen has a new online presence and a new monthly newsletter: Gather and Sow.

The Gather and Sow: February 2026 issue is out, just in time for Valentine’s Day. It’s all about love and chocolate.

Cauliflorous fruits on a cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), in a glasshouse at the United States Botanic Garden.

We intend to post new issues of Gather and Sow every month. Content here on the blog will generally remain available. We remain dedicated to illuminating the fascinating biology of our food plants. 

Each issue of Gather and Sow will feature three components:

• Food for Thought: an essay, possibly seasonal or inspired by current events
• Botany Lab of the Month: a botany lesson for the hands-on learner, packaged as an activity or recipe designed for the home kitchen
• Baker’s Dozen and Gleanings: We highlight thirteen-ish recent research articles and other relevant media, respectively, that further our understanding of the biology of our food plants.

FAQ: Aren’t you two writing a book? Is it done yet? Yes, we are writing The Botanist in the Kitchen book. No, it is not done yet. We have an agent (Hi Lucy!). And a book proposal document. We are close to being done with our sample chapters. Hopefully a publisher will take interest very soon. We’ll post updates with the newsletters. 

We would love to hear from you.

You can subscribe to Gather and Sow from theGhost site. We will also publicize newsletters here on the blog  and on social media (Bluesky, Facebook). Please email us at botanistinthekitchen@gmail.com.