When the collard greens have surrendered to the white flies, and the bean vines have browned, and the last of the lettuce is sulking outright, I sometimes get a notion to plant something that will make it through the winter. Chard, maybe. Scallions. That nubbly kind of kale. It will have to have enough self-regard to see itself through, because my interest in gardening wanes precipitously come fall. But if I could pluck something for dinner right out of the ground in February I would feel mighty smug about it. You need a little smugness in February.

This year it occurred to me that people plant garlic in the fall. You can’t harvest it in February but even seeing the plants out there not being dead would give me that little starch of virtue. I figured the garden centers would have wooden barrels full of garlic sets and I could grab a handful in a small paper bag and plunk down some coins at the register for them.

Well, sort of. The garlic was indeed in an array of wooden baskets mounted on the wall, each labeled with a different varietal name, and the astonishing price tag of $25.99/lb. Under the circumstances I picked out two fat bulbs of garlic and trudged to the counter, trepidated. Um, what do I do with these? Do I separate them into cloves and bury them in the ground? Yes, that is what I am supposed to do. Well then. That doesn’t seem so bad. I can get several plants out of this one fat bulb. Ring me up!

Remarkably, my two bulbs of garlic weighed in at exactly a half pound and I took them home and spent a bit of time trying to rationalize having bought thirteen bucks worth of garlic I could close my fist around. The grocery store is currently advertising garlic for 67 cents apiece. Could I take one grocery-store garlic and pop its cloves in the ground and achieve garlic? Would it be as good? And—third question—what kind of chump am I?

I was not interested in the answer to the third question so I went into rationalization overdrive. My two nursery garlic bulbs were particularly attractive. They were fat and shiny. One had a pinkish tone. And, most significant, they were named varieties. Named! No plain old garlic for me! I didn’t have Store garlic: I had White German garlic and Music garlic. And once I got it going, it would probably keep going. I was buying heirloom fancy garlic one time for a lifetime of future garlic.

Of course, what’s left of my lifetime at this point ain’t what it used to be.

Still, I pulled my garlic into cloves—advertised to be up to 13 per head, but each of them comprised six only—stuffed them into my fluffy soil an inch deep and wrote up a little sign for each row. MUSIC, said one sign, and WHITE GERMAN said the other, although I’m not 100% sure the German isn’t the Music and vice versa, or if the German one is actually something else altogether, and in either case I’m not sure what difference it makes, but I hope it makes some because they were $6.50 a pop. It’s not going to be worth it if I can’t, at some future date, casually mention that my lasagna contains my own homegrown Music garlic. “Oh, I was considering the White German,” I would drone to my guests, “but I was afraid it might be rather too assertive.”

The next instruction on my handout was to cover the rows with grass clippings or compost or the like. I don’t have grass clippings but my new Meadow had been whacked back recently so I gathered up some decapitated Sweet Alyssum and made a nice blanket for my garlic. There. My winter crop has been planted. It is Expensive and thus it must be much better than other garlic, probably the best dang garlic on the block. Some primal urge to be a better steward of the land and a practitioner of sustainability was satisfied.

Nothing has poked up out of the soil yet. However. My bed of sweet alyssum has been neatly rearranged into what looks like a double row of bird’s-nests with holes in the middle corresponding to the exact positions my twelve garlic cloves were planted in. I dug around a bit. No garlic cloves.

Squirrels and vampires are said to disdain garlic. My assumption is that my local scrub jays have deleted my entire garlic crop and are turning it into expensive bird poop as we speak. I’d gut one to find out, but they scare me. They’re very pointy.

Next garlic attempt will cost me $13 to start. I don’t know how much razor wire goes for.