Botany within your reach. 3. Potato tubers are stems.

It's always nice when other people help the cause.  So here's a link to a nice discussion about potato tubers. When things grow underground there arises considerable confusion about whether they are roots or stems. There are three kinds of subterranean storage stems: horizontal ones often near the surface are called rhizomes (ginger)(labeled "ginger root" but it's a rhizome), short erect ones called corms (taro), and elongate to globular ones are called tubers. Tubers can also grow aerially.  So like all good stems potatoes have leaves, highly modified, and buds ("eyes")that give rise to branches. This is well illustrated at the link above.  And then these branches can give rise to roots, and ultimately to new plants. This was an idea TPP was going to do for his BWYR series, but this blog was just too good to pass up.  HT and many thanks to the Botanist in the kitchen blog. TPP provides a regular feed so you can just look for them in the blog roll side column.
For the record sweet potatoes are roots but have a stemish quality at their proximal end. True yams are tubers, but in North America, yams are a variety of sweet potato. 

Indiana Jones of Ginger

Just a couple of blogs ago, an article featured a long-time botanical friend of mine from the New York Botanical Garden, now here's a broadcast featuring John Kress, Curator of Botany at the Smithsonian, as the "Indiana Jones of Ginger". Man, the Phactor needs a better PR person because no way my old buddy John wears a fedora anywhere near as well as the Phactor. But John has spent a career studying the ginger family and its close relatives, and they are a fascinating group of plants. Here's the "weeping goldsmith", not a flower but an inflorescence, that John is talking about, and he's written a book of the same name about his field research in Myanmar. Dang, the Phactor also has to finish his book because if it's published posthumously you don't get as many interviews.