Vintage Summer Fruit Printables

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Vintage botanical posters are hot right now – but they’re also expensive – so we’re offering you these free vintage summer fruit printables!

I have a confession.

You may not understand it. You may not agree with it. You may not like it.

But my heart no longer resides in America.

I was born here. I was raised here. I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else.

And I still love America fiercely.

But.

But my heart lives in Turkey.

It is where I long to be.

Among the fishing boats moored along the Aegean coast of Izmir.

On the beaches of Antalya where the warm white sands slip into the cool blue Mediterranean Sea.

In the bazaars of Istanbul, lost among the infinite display of color and sound and smell.

I miss the people. The Turkish coffee shops. The restaurants.

I miss the food – the fresh cuisine of a country unspoiled by preservatives and chemicals and poison-peddling food lobbies that line the pockets of politicians at the expense of its people’s health.

Every time we visit Turkey, my blood pressure lowers without medication. I sleep through the night. My heart stops palpitating, and the nervous tick that afflicts my face in this country disappears.

I credit these small miracles to the Mediterranean way of life and the Mediterranean diet in particular. Fish, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, nuts, local meat, rice and fresh bread. When I’m in Turkey, I don’t eat many sweets. My body doesn’t want them.

Instead I eat fruit.

Watermelon, grapes and maybe some sour cherry preserves with breakfast, along with white cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers and bread.

And figs, grapes, apricots, pears, and plums after dinner.

Handan and I love the fruit of a Mediterranean summer, and so we decided to make some summer fruit botanical printables to share with our VIP readers.

Fresh figs! Have you ever had one? I had my first when I lived in San Francisco. Until then, I thought figs were the crap inside a Fig Newton bar. Fresh figs are nothing like that sweetened, oxidized goop! They are soft and delicate and bursting with the sweetest nectar. This is why they can’t be shipped fresh very far. They are fleeting things that must be consumed shortly after picking. Dried figs just can’t compare.

Cherries are a favorite around here. Barish loves them, especially! We have two cherry trees now – one black and one bing. I can’t wait until they start to give a good yield of fruit!

When Handan first moved here, she was horrified at what American chemical manufacturers food companies call “cherry flavor.” It tastes nothing like a real cherry. I wonder how many kids out there have never had a real cherry to compare to the bright red artificial “cherry?”

We love to see our printables out in the wild! If you display our free printables in your home or use our free SVGs in your projects, and take a picture and post it on Instagram, be sure to tag us @TheNavagePatch!

Plums are a childhood favorite of mine. I loved hunting for the perfect specimen: red and sweet inside but still firm enough to bite without it collapsing. Turks love plums, too, and they even have a type they eat green and unripe. They are really sour but delicious when dipped in salt.

Pears are Handan’s favorite (along with figs). They are sometimes baked into desserts in Turkey, but Handan just loves them raw. She doesn’t understand how Americans seem to prefer apples over pears. For her, the choice is always pear!

Can you think of Mediterranean cuisine without grapes? Whether it be grapes in a vineyard grown for wine or table grapes alongside some local cheese, grapes are ubiquitous in Turkey and the surrounding countries.

Here’s a fruit that’ll throw you for a loop: the almond. Yeah, yeah, I know, to you it’s just a nut. But on the tree, that nut is surrounded by a fruit, just like a peach. Here in America, our food overlords throw away that fruit and just offer us the nut. But Turks love to eat that fruit with salt, just like the sour plum. They also eat the nuts, of course! And they should know best. After all, the almond is indigenous to Turkey.

Okay, you’ve seen 6 of the 9 summer fruit printables we’ve made for you. The other 3 are in the picture below: peach, sour cherry and apricot.

The sour cherry is beloved in Turkey. It is juiced, it is made into preserves and it is eaten whole from the tree. Of all the cherries, it has the best and most interesting flavor. Sadly, it is a hard flavor to find in this country.

We all know dried apricots – probably even dried Turkish apricots. As far as apricots go, the Turks grow the best in the world. But like the fig, the apricot can’t travel far when fresh, so it must be preserved by drying. Of course, that process changes the taste entirely, so the dried apricot is nothing like its fresh brethren.

Someday you may go to Turkey. When you do, you will eat fresh apricots and fresh figs and a hundred other fresh local foods that will awaken your senses and make you understand the beauty and importance of real food, untouched by corporations and chemicals.

Before I go, let me give you the usual information on today’s printables: we designed these 9 vintage summer fruit printables to fit into a 16Ă—20 inch frame or a 24Ă—36 poster frame, though you may scale them up or down as necessary. 24Ă—36 inch scales down easily to 20Ă—30 / 16Ă—24 / 12Ă—18 / 8Ă—12 / 4Ă—6 inches, and 16Ă—20 inch scales down to 12Ă—15 / 8Ă—10 / 4Ă—5 inches with no problems. If you need help with scaling down these printables so you can print them using your home printer, then make sure you check out Handan’s “How To Easily Resize Pictures” post.

Note:  If you don’t have a large format printer like the Canon i8720 Printer (prints up to 13Ă—19 inches) and are wondering the best place to get these large printables printed bigger than 8Ă—12, we recommend trying Staples in your area or Amazon print shop. Both stores offer custom-sized prints on matte or glossy paper, and they both cost about the same. Staples also offers Engineering Prints, which are really affordable for large-format prints, but in some areas (like ours), they must be ordered from their online print shop.

Now it’s time to click on the button below to download today’s free summer fruit printables – they are all in the Vintage Illustrations section of The VIP Patch.

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23 Comments

  1. Please help. I have subscribed to your site, but could not the link to print the beautiful botanicals. I want to print them on my color printer. Thanks.

  2. Thank You for sharing, in a way that deeply touched my heart, Greg.
    You chose the perfect words to awaken the great richness of our magnificent planet.
    I now hope to experience what your family loves! To Turkey!!!!
    Thank You for your gift.

    Kind Regards,
    Carmen

    1. Hi Chris, they are under the “Vintage Illustrations” section in the VIP Patch. Let us know if you still can’t find them, so I can walk you through.

  3. Greg…very thoughtful post. I’m happy that you love America fiercely & hope that you allow your heart to share your “residence” with same. Your & Handan’s posts have become a learning experience for me & not only for your talents. I thank you both for that. Perhaps your wistful longing for Turkey can one day become a shared residence…here & there. I’m much older than you, so perhaps these are the mumblings of someone with a bit more of life experience, although I haven’t seen nearly as much of the world as you have. Be happy…
    Bonnie

    1. Hi Bonnie, it is my dream to someday live in both countries. Handan is already blessed with dual citizenship. I’m not as fortunate. I hope, someday, but first I’ll need to learn Turkish, and that is no small task.

  4. My partner is in USA right now as I type. He has just come back from Bulgaria and often goes to Greece and Turkey (best windsurfing in the world he says!) He ADORES the Mediterranean lifestyle. He adores Turkey and all its fine wonderful food. In fact, just the other day he and I were discussing the fact how Turks really don’t eat much sweets.

    He and I, back here in Sunny Australia, planted out sour cherry, about 4 or 5 different variety of sweet cherries, plums, pears, apricots, nectarines and lordy only knows what else! We grow tomatoes by the truckload, any vegie you can think of and a million strawberries. Nothing is better than walking outside and picking some yumminess straight off the tree/vine or the ground. We have many people stop and discuss the garden, which is on the corner of a suburb where no one plants anything but perfectly lined plants and decorative rocks! We give away so much food, people are always so happy and will come back and say how it was the best thing they have ever eaten!

    I shall print out these gorgeous pictures and hang them for him as a surprise for when he comes home soon, and then shall listen to him wax lyrical of how he misses Turkey.

    1. Hi Aletheia, it sounds like you guys have created an awesome life for yourselves! Have you been to Turkey, too? If not, I do hope you’ll join him on one of his trips! It is an overlooked gem at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Mediterranean!

  5. Can’t wait for the prints but I, too, am having trouble finding the fruit prints in the free printables. Need some help, please! I subscribed to your site a while back and still can’t find them with the password.

  6. this is a fresh fruit and veggie eating house, my grandson look like they committed murder by the time they eat a bowl of cherries, used to get figs on a string man they were great, our garden this year has yielded green beans tomatoes the weirdest looking but best tasting cukes ever, zukes and we are patiently waiting on a shitload of watermelons, kids have had a blast helping and eating lol,……… these prints are gorgeous xx

    1. Chris, feeding the little ones with fresh fruits and veggies is the greatest gift you can give them in life! The sugar-drug industry gets its hooks into kids practically straight from the womb and creates lifelong addicts, so I love to see parents (and grandparents) fighting back!

  7. What a lovely blog this one had me drooling at the thought of fresh fruit. We have had a few stormy nights after weeks of baking hot weather and two heavily laden branches have broken from my plum tree, the blackbirds have scoffed most of my cherries before they have ripened properly, now i just have to keep the wasps off my apple tree. All three trees have had the best crops ever this year .Love the gorgeous prints thanks for sharing. You’r e right about figs Greg nothing like a fresh one.

    1. Hi Catherine, it’s been a good year in the garden here, too! But as it seems the critters are whittling away at your crop, I’ve been battling fungus and disease all year. Still, it looks to be a decent harvest (except for a whole block of peppers that was wiped out).

  8. It seems more of us than not dan not can’t find the link to print the botanicals even though I am signed up to your wonderful newsletters.
    Can you please send it to me too at my email address?
    Thank you
    Martha

    1. Hi Martha, these vintage botanicals are in the Vintage Illustrations section of the VIP Patch. Please let me know if you’re still having trouble finding them. đŸ™‚

    2. Hi Martha, our printables are high-resolution files (very large size files), therefore we can’t email them to anyone. But they’re all in the VIP patch, and we certainly can help you finding them. Please see the picture below to show you where you can find them. Also, in case you have difficulty in the future, please note that you can go to our Printables F.A.Q page and download our “How To Download Free Printables” help file. It shows step-by-step where to find all of our printables and how to download them whether you’re using a mobile phone or computer. đŸ™‚

      Summer Fruit Printables Download Help