New 'Crops of America' Stamps

I went to the Post Office today to stock up on 39-cent stamps, and found these lovely, colorful stamps depicting "Crops of America". Here's some information from the USPS web site:

The crops depicted in this stamp booklet — corn, chili peppers, beans, squashes and sunflowers — had been cultivated in the Americas for centuries when Europeans first arrived in the New World.

Artist Steve Buchanan created each of the five stamp designs. As reference, he used slide photographs made by his wife Rita, a consultant for the stamp project. The slides document Rita Buchanan's research in the late 1970s on indigenous agricultural methods in the southwestern United States.

The stamp art includes ears of corn (Zea mays); red and green chilies (Capsicum annuum); lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus), scarlet runner beans (P. coccineus), and pintos and other common beans (P. vulgaris); various squashes (Cucurbita spp.); and a sunflower and seeds (Helianthus annuus).