Create a cute fall foliage craft using broccoli

While you may not be able to get your kids to eat all of their broccoli, we bet you’ll have no trouble convincing them to do this fun craft with the cruciferous veggie.

Blogger Stacey Gibbon, who runs a kid-friendly crafting site called Glued To My Crafts, shared a fun and easy tutorial that calls for broccoli as a stamp to create beautiful leaves for a fall foliage painting.

The painting technique is not only simple, it’s also inexpensive, especially if you have a few pieces of broccoli to spare while you’re cooking and need to keep the kids busy, Gibbon says. Bonus: There’s no need to clean paint brushes when you’re done!

By using a palette of four quintessential fall colors (think: crimson red, burnt orange, yellow and brown), you and your kids can dab the raw broccoli in the paint and then stamp your paper. The broccoli florets lend the tree leaves a nice texture. You can find the full tutorial from Glued to my Crafts here.

Look at how the trees are bursting with autumn colors:

If you aren’t great at painting the foundation of your trees — the trunk — Glued To My Crafts even has a free tree printable that you can download and print. (Be sure to use a colored printer; the trees and its branches are brown.)

The broccoli-stamped trees are so pretty they’d make beautiful autumn cards. Once they dry, you could have your children practice gratitude and write a card to someone in their lives for whom they’re thankful.

If you end up loving the autumnal craft, you can use broccoli florets as sponges to make art with your kids throughout the rest of the year. Glued to My Crafts has easy tutorials for broccoli-stamped Christmas trees, winter trees and cherry blossom trees.

So, while you may have told your kids before not to play with their food, there’s nothing wrong with making art with it, right?