Don't laugh... I grew these myself!

[Pulsegleaner]

Forgot a paragraph

Two of the domestic garlics actually DID split, though one of those was in the "picked way too soon category" so it's probably now a dead end (the four cloves there look waay too tall thin to have survivable embryo's in there) the one consolation is that based on the arrangement, that one was probably a softneck, so at least I didn't lose the scape (since it wouldn't have gotten one).
the other one looks like what I took the photo of (though whiter) so that's about as big as it will probably ever get. Though I may re-plant it unbroken just to see if I can get it to a more respectable size (that is how you make a garlic head bigger right, plant the whole head as is instead of dividing it into it's components)

 

[britesea]

Well, if you insist on growing corn, yes it will be prohibitively expensive to completely enclose it. I was thinking more along the lines of things like bush beans and beets and cabbages, which could easily be enclosed for not too much money.

If you are fixed on growing rare and endangered seed, you may have to wait until you can get to a place with fewer problems as it sounds like you're butting your head against a brick wall where you are.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I have a nagging suspicion that, utimately, I'll be butting my head against some sort of wall for much of the forseeable future. Any plans for getting the kind of space I need would require moving a LOT farther away from the city than I am, so what gains I might make on the ability to grow odder seeds would be offset by a diminished ability to get those seeds in the first place.
That being said, I may actually rig up some cages this winter. Not for corn, that would be beyond me. But I was toying with upping my pea crop next year. Thouse would not require as big a cage, since the peas could just climb on them. With things like that the "danger zone" is a lot shorter. Peas and beans tend to only get attacked as long as they still have bits of the cot attached. Get them past that, and they are left alone until the pods show up8, by which point, most (emphasis on most) of them are too tall for the squirrels and chipmunks to reach.). For beans it would sort of depend on which beans. Of waht I have flowering this year, the FPM is actually semi pole (it goes to about half bush heigh then sends out runners off the top) so it'd need a cage with a lot of places for it to interlace. And so far, the one MG that has flowers is flowering alarmingly short (the plant can't be more than three or four inches tall) which is a real risk as long as the chipmunks are around (since it means all the pods are literally touching the ground as soon as they are full grown. So that is staying Pedestal only until I can find one that gets a bit taller. And most of the other beans I have grown never actually produced anything (that's why I use those cockamamie ones, they work for me).
Cabbage is a no go, as I said, it doesn't head or make enough leaves in or soil to be worth it. Ditto beets, they'd have the same problem as the rest of the root veggies. Plus no one in the house likes them much, ouside of borsht (and I doubt our garden would yield enough beet mass to make more than a bowful of that (maybe one small pot if it was winter borsht, since the other things could be used to stretch the beets out.)

*there was that incident where sometihng actuall bit my rice bean vines off at the base when they were pod laden, pulled down the whole vine, and literally ate it like spagetti, but that was the exception, not the rule.