We’re all familiar with horoscopes. They tell you about yourself and predict your future based on the position of the stars at the precise moment of your birth. Ordinarily if somebody drones on and on, saying something about you that you already know, you might pass out from sheer boredom. But for some reason, when a horoscope does it, it’s interesting.
Maybe it’s the way horoscopes personalize their observations. They start out, “Dear Gemini (oh, you know me so well!), You are a cautious person. Today your Jupiter moon is in retrograde. Wear something blue and try to look on the bright side.” And so on.
I’m not suggesting horoscopes don’t actually reveal the real you, but maybe there are other ways of gaining insight into your personality. For example, the kind of vegetables you grow.
Dear Zucchini, you are a generous person by nature, more likely to give than to receive. You give until it hurts. You give until your neighbors hide when they see you coming and close their blinds and turn out the lights. “No more! No more!” they cry. But your zucchinis just keep coming.
Dear Jalapeno, you are a masochist. You grow the hottest peppers and stick the fiery slices in everything—chili, scrambled eggs, tuna casserole—even though it scorches your throat and makes you sweat and cry like a baby. No, you do it BECAUSE it hurts! You think pain is a flavor. You’ve got a problem.
Dear Potato, you don’t care what other people think. They can grow their lemongrass and their French sorrel. You grow food. Okay, maybe your potatoes are ugly and they’re mostly dirt. But when the grid goes down and people are scrounging through Dumpsters for leftover scraps of KFC, you’re going to have a basement full of potatoes. (And 200 pounds of dried milk and three flare guns.)
Dear Celery, be honest—you’re a show-off. Store-bought celery tastes just as good as homegrown—which is to say, basically like water. And it’s cheap. Raising your own celery is a gardener’s nightmare. The growing season is insanely long—you have to start the seeds 10 weeks before the last frost—and the seeds are so tiny, you need a magnifying glass to find them. If your summer gets too hot or too cool, your celery will shrivel and die. But if it lives to maturity, your gardener friends will fall at your feet with admiration (and scrape the soil off your shoes to plant in their own gardens.)
Dear Tomato, you are a gardener’s gardener. You could buy your tomatoes at the grocery store. You could even buy them at the Farmer’s Market. But you know there is no substitute for that sweet, tangy tomato flavor that has comes down to us through the centuries and seems to require your personal touch to make it come alive. You love to eat—more specifically, you love to taste—and there is nothing quite like a fresh-picked garden tomato (maybe with a little salt) that so distinctively captures the taste of summer. Sitting cross-legged on your grass with tomato juice running down your arm, you know, no matter what your horoscope says, you were born at precisely the perfect time.