I have a crazy, all out, intense love affair with vegetables. Don’t get me wrong, I like flowers, but most of them don’t taste very good. And that, in my book, is a deal breaker. I’d really rather spend my time with warty winter squash, speckled lettuces, and baby radishes.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled across these gorgeous, linoleum block prints of vegetables by the gardener and Bay Area artist Rigel Stuhmiller. Rigel starts by drawing each vegetable portrait into a block of linoleum and carving out all of the negative space—leaving behind the image. She then hand colors and prints each portrait.

I emailed Rigel to ask her about the prints and she wrote back that she was inspired by the amazing diversity of vegetables grown at Chino Farms—a family owned farm near San Diego that sells about 75 different varieties of vegetables to restaurants and at a farm stand. Rigel says that the farm feels like a second home to her and that the vegetables are the best she’s ever had.  While I won’t have a chance to try the Chino Farms produce in person this summer, I think Rigel’s prints are definitely the next best thing.

Lovely radicchio

Artichoke portrait

Vegetable (and one fruit!) notecard collection

To find out more about the linoleum print process, check out Rigel’s step-by-step explanation on her website, where you can also find more of her prints, and purchase them (the prints sell for $10 each and the notecards are $18 for a packet of six).