LATELY I HAVE been making Thai food. This means I have returned to the Alice-in-Wonderland world known as the lemongrass market. Thai cooking, as you probably know, makes extensive use of lemongrass – those pale green stalks that resemble oversize scallions – and lemongrass costs $8 or $9 a pound if you buy it at the Real Food Co. or Tower Market, as I did a few times, because I was there and it was convenient and it occurred to me.

Of course, you need a lot less than a pound of lemongrass for the typical Thai dish – tom kha gai, say, the coconut-milk soup with chunks of chicken. A stalk or two, chopped up and simmered in the coconut milk (along with chicken broth and several coins of galanga, or blue ginger), is sufficient. So it's not as if you're out a lot of money for a big tureen of soup. Still: $9 a pound is a tariff one associates with fancy wild mushrooms, or Basque cheese.

I was not surprised to find that lemongrass can be had for far less in the Asian markets on inner Clement Street, but I was surprised at how much less. You can get it there for 79¢ (cents) a pound; a huge bundle cost me about a buck. This would seem to be a good thing, except that lemongrass does not keep forever – maybe two to three weeks in the refrigerator, according to Kasma Loha-unchit in her excellent Dancing Shrimp: Favorite Thai Recipes for Seafood. And I am not an everyday Thai cook.

But lo! Dancing Shrimp posits an even more attractive alternative to 79¢ a pound lemongrass, and that is growing your own. You do this simply by rooting a stalk in the ground (assuming you have access to at least a patch of arable land) and keeping it wet until, through rhizomes, you will have a clump, as of miniature bamboo, in "no time"; or you can root a stalk just by dunking the root end in a dish of water.

To be on the safe side, I am pursuing both these alternatives. So far, nothing ... but patience! Meantime the Kaffir lime tree (really a bush), perhaps cheered by the presence of lemongrass in the ground nearby, has actually begun to fruit for the first time in several years. Kaffir limes are small, like little, dark green marbles, and they have a powerful perfume that doesn't quite suit dessert tarts. But that does not really matter, for their real value lies in their peels, which (we learn from Dancing Shrimp) make up an essential element of Thai curry pastes. As does, of course, lemongrass. Galanga too – another DIY possibility I haven't yet D'd. Yet.