I abandoned my true garlic seed breeding project several times. For better or worse, garlic weeds thrive in my garden, therefore the project gets restarted from the weeds.
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(Laugh.) I like the idea of garlic becoming a seed-grown weed in my garden! 
Growing garlic from bulbils works pretty easily, here at least. It’s interesting that the bulbils come in all different sizes: some scapes having a half dozen and others twice that. These look viable…I did it because I wanted many hundred of bulbs without buying them. First year they come up as small rounds. Next year as small bulbs and then increase in size after that. I actually put the small rounds down the edge of many of my beds and there might be some benefit in keeping rodents away from crops and trees. I’ll be planting this fall for the third season and some of the bulbs are of good size. Many are still on the small size but I don’t fertilize at all.
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Thanks for your reply and your info! So am I understanding right in that you plant the bulbils, then pulled them (late summer, normal garlic harvest time), then replanted in fall. And repeated that with the same bulbils turned bulbs for 3 consecutive seasons?
Yes, that’s right. It’s nice having an abundance of free garlic.
And any bulbs left in the ground will start to divide…some people leave garlic perpetually in place around fruit trees to deter critters…it would be interesting to see what those look like over time. I’ll try that with extra small bulbs this fall because I guess that could be a year-round source of fresh garlic, with no work, and protect trees at the same time.
I’ve been wondering if that would work! My mom has a lot of deer in her neighborhood. If she plants garlic around all her fruit trees, would that keep the deer from eating the bark (and possibly girdling and killing the trees) in winter?
I don’t know about deer, but gophers in my area certainly love garlic cloves. They ate 75% of a pretty big patch somebody had next to my potatoes. He had a whole plan to sprinkle garlic plants around the farm the following year to deter gophers from potatoes but those dreams were obviously dashed 
The gophers actually preferred garlic to potatoes.
That jives with what Carol Deppe said about gophers in one of her books! (The Tao of Vegetable Gardening?) She said something like, “Enough garlic for the gophers is all. It doesn’t matter if you plant five or five thousand – the gophers will eat them all.”
I guess if I wanted to grow garlic in a place that had gophers (or most root crops, for that matter!), I’d look into deep wire baskets that could be buried in the ground. I imagine something like that could work to keep gophers from getting the crops.
It really was remarkable when I realized that one of the biggest annoyances I’ve had about my land – the fact that the soil is chock full of enormous rocks, as in it’s pretty much pure rocks interspersed with tiny pockets of sand after about a foot down – is actually a huge blessing. We have no gophers here. Turns out gophers don’t like soil that’s mostly huge rocks.
Of course, if you’re an adventurous eater and you live in a place with a lot of gophers, maybe you could plant garlic on purpose in order to lure in gophers to capture and eat them. 
Article here about how to prepare them. Apparently they taste good. (I’ve never eaten gopher, but I’d be totally up for trying it if somebody offered it to me.)
Actually, I’ve seriously pondered that in places with a lot of critters eating your garden, the most ecologically sustainable solution would be to start making traps to catch and eat those critters. “If you eat all my plants, I’ll eat you” seems like a way to turn a problem into a solution – either way, you get food. And I bet over time, the critters will learn that your garden is dangerous, so you’ll start getting plants to eat, too.
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And a gopher fattened on garlic might be extra tasty? Seasoned already! Hahaha!
I suspect that the bones of gopher would soften nicely if pressure cooked.
I bet they would! I’ve taken to using a pressure cooker to make bone broth out of all my meat bones (I tend to do it about once a year, and store them in the freezer until then). They soften easily, and once all the flavor is cooked out, I add them to my compost. The softened bones break down into compost quickly.
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Ha ha ha! Thanks, Mark, that’s useful to know! I have never skinned an animal in my life, so I know absolutely nothing about it.