garlic II...planting

grabbed a bag of half a pound of seed garlic on my way out the door ( we are seriously overstocked on this because i double ordered it if anyone is interested in a bulb )...this is an organic garden so there is only organic garlic ( and anything else ) going in...i picked out some likely looking bulbs ( i really only used two ) and broke them apart...looks can be deceiving and two bulbs gave me twenty cloves...so i dug some holes about two inches deep in the newly turned and hoed soil and put the cloves in, pointy side up, loosely covering them with soil... put up some markers to demarcate the garlic bed when we clean out the hopi blue stalks later this fall...all in all about an hour's worth of work...we will be mulching the garlic...probably when we mulch the strawberries just to make sure they get through the winter...we should have a good harvest next year ( and there will be more in another bed as well )...garlic is perceived as having multiple healthy benefits for human users and is thought to be a repellant to a number of destructive insects...there will be maize in both beds with the garlic next spring...perhaps it will work on squirrels as well..research tells me that if we pinch off the seed buds when the plants reach two feet in height and then only harvest the larger plants and leaving the smaller ones to die back all we will need to do is mulch the bed next autumn and in spring the bulbs the smaller plant produce will return to create a self-sustaining garlic bed for as long as we care to repeat the process...i am in for the long haul so it seems like an idea worth pursuing.