The November 2026 issue of our Gather and Sow newsletter is out, just in time for Plantsgiving.

The fourth Thursday in November is, of course, Plantsgiving, a day anticipated for weeks by botanists all across America. That’s when we transform a national day of gluttony into a challenge: put as many botanical ingredients on the table as possible. The winner is the host with the most taxonomically diverse menu (which almost always kicks off with a gin and tonic, netting a couple dozen plants right there).

We love a big branchy phylogenetic tree, but shouldn’t an appealing array of colors and structures count towards diversity, too? We would like to propose that this year’s Plantsgiving contest use a composite metric that accounts for pigments and plant parts. By that measure, you wouldn’t have to mail order obscure spices to compete. Vegetables as common as potatoes and sweet potatoes–stalwarts of the modern holiday menu–could earn you a lot of points if you took advantage of their anthocyanins and carotenoids. And given their importance to diets around the world, we believe that these humble tubers are especially deserving of our gratitude this time of year.

In this month’s Food for Thought we clarify the taxonomic identities of potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams, and we say a few things about their marvelous colors. We also talk about the tubers that were actually present at the first Thanksgiving. Spoiler: not yams, sweet potatoes, or potatoes. Then, in Botany Lab of the Month, we take a close look at the morphology of potatoes and sweet potatoes. We conclude, as always, with a roundup of recent relevant media and journal articles in Gleanings and Baker’s Dozen. This newsletter will leave you empowered to amass tuber-related Plantsgiving points and transform dinner into a pedagogical opportunity if talk of politics threatens to ruin the meal.