It’s not worth the labor.

I wholeheartedly agree.
It’s not worth the labor if you don't know what you are doing. Gardening is like printing free money, and it is an enjoyable hobby that provides some stress relieving exercise, IF you know what you are doing.
Using cheap-ass store bought garlic is a big mistake.
I don't plow, till and hardly weed yet have a fantastic garden that provides way more high quality produce than we can use. My fresh tasty heirloom produce is not sprayed with any toxic chemicals. I get free rotten hay bales from farmers for mulch and fertilizer from our chickens. I save seeds from varieties that do well in our area.

I let it grow when it happens accidentally.

It happens often because I take my vegetable trimmings and peels to the garden and use it as mulch. I try to remove the seeds and stuff that can grow (like potato peels), but there's often root of garlic that end up mixed with the peel. Which is no big deal. Often, they only start growing in the spring or summer, so I only harvest immature forms. Which is fine. It's not like I was invested in that garlic.

My parents grow their own vegetables and they even have some beehives and make and sell their own honey.

I once calculated their hourly wages for beekeeping, and I only counted the time they spent harvesting and processing the honey, nothing else. Not even the cost of materials, bees, food, medicine, nothing. Not the time spent doing anything but harvesting.

It came out to ~€5/h.

Just don't plant cheap stuff.

I will probably never grow onions, potatoes, corn, celery and other vegetables that are always cheap.

I will plant things that are easy and or pricey. Tomatoes for sure, if I bought the tomatoes at the store I would probably have spent $500 just on tomatoes a season. Chives are also easy to manage and expensive in store. Aspargus is stupid expensive and is almost hard to get rid of once established. Some berry type fruits are also worth growing if you have spare land for them since they come back each year.

That's why tiktok and youtube shorts are just braindead. I read this other thing where "kids" bought all the cucumbers in stores because there is this crazy new thing called cucumber salad. A week or so later a friend visits me and for some reason it came up and she was like: yeah, i had to try this cucumber thing, because it was everywhere on tiktok, and it turns out it's:s just a salad.

This woman is 36 years old.

It's not worth the labor.

This is my perspective. I hate weeding, more than almost anything. I hate crouching and bending over, and shuffling slowly from patch to patch. I hate gardening. I hate getting sweaty and the kind of dirty you get in the garden: gritty, and it finds its way into your shoes and gloves. Gardening sucks.

If I was really invested, I might do hydroponics. Elevated, minimum to no weeds, no crawling around in the dirt. I don't know whether, in the end, I'd actually save any money, though.

Were you trying to grow softneck or hardneck? Most grocery store garlic where I live is softneck garlic from china which doesn't grow well in colder climates. Hardneck garlic, on the other hand, requires a long cold winter in order to flower in the spring. We bought a clove of hardneck from the farmers market, threw two of the biggest cloves in the garden about 6 inches down, and then did absolutely nothing to them for 9 months. The bulb wasn't as large as the original one but I plan to replant 6 or 7 of the second harvest and see what happens. I usually buy garlic just because of how fucking loooooooooong it takes. I'm tryin to make some pasta not a baby!

Warning: may lead to overpopulation, hierarchy, authoritarian forms of government, malnutrition, slavery, and war. Use at your own risk.

You're descended from bears?

LOL. I started out with a little wooded land, cut trees, cleared it, bought a $1,200 well used mobile home and now have a nice home with three gardens. Buy small and grow.

Where do you live that 200k gets you enough land to grow your own food? Mine was £230k and all I can realistically grow a years supply of in a year is a few types of herbs.

Have you tried giving up avocado toast?

Make aioli.

EDIT: also, eat Lebanese while you have fresh garlic.

I would say they could pickle the garlic... but then they'll probably just end up with too much pickled garlic.