If Charlie Parker was a fruitslinger...

...there'd be a lot of pied copycats.

Obscure jazz quote reference to announce the third season of one of the best Chicago food blogs, Fruitslinger, written by a foodwriter turned farm helper-outer/Green City Market farmstand guy, Daniel Shumski. (The precise farm he works for is kept a secret, though regular GCM customers will figure it out and spot him fairly quickly.) Here's an example from last year:

I finished helping Peter pack the truck — not that it was packed, mind you, just that I was finished helping.

I said I was going to check on the melons. And I did.

But then I walked to the farthest part of the orchard, past the rows of melons, past the apple trees, past the dilapidated shack and the old windmill, past the pear trees.

I stopped at the peach trees. Lupe and his crew had just finished the first picking and the boxes were about to be loaded on the truck for our first market with peaches, always a big day. Always a dividing line, too, in terms of workload. The peaches come in merciless, ridiculous quantities. Box after box to unload, sort through and put out on the tables.

But that was still 10 hours away as I reached out for the branch in front of me. I twisted off the fruit and cradled it in my palm. I walked back to the barn sniffing the peach every 10 paces. The fuzz rubbed against my nose.

Twenty-four hours and 24 boxes of peaches later, they would smell like work. But that first one smelled like summer.

He takes nice photos, too. Very yummy photos of really good fruit. Anyway, you can read it here, and if you like it, there's something else you can do: he's got a little campaign going to raise $950 for a better camera and better hosting for the site. The appeal is here; he's up to $867, so there's a month left to raise the whole amount (it's done by credit card through Amazon, so nobody gets charged until the full amount is reached). So read the blog. If you like it, maybe kick in $2 or $5 or $10. Anyway, read the blog.

I just took a look. Man if he gets/has a Twitter account I will heart him for next week's #followfriday.

pairs4life wrote:I just took a look. Man if he gets/has a Twitter account I will heart him for next week's #followfriday.

Now following fruitslinger on Twitter.