I need some advice. Here's the situation.

We moved to new house last year and in the fall I planted various seed cloves of garlic in my newly constructed raised beds. We moved in August and I got everything in during early October. Although the yard is relatively flat, what I didn't realize is that one of my boxes was placed in a low spot and that once it rains (which it didn't do for most of the summer in this area), water collects in the low spot and is very, very slow to drain. The soil is rather heavy but the soil I put in the boxes was good, loose soil composed of topsoil, spaghum moss, and vermiculite, roughly a third of each. I was a little short of topsoil so the boxes were not topped off as much as I would have liked.

After planting the cloves, I gather fallen leaves (mostly maple and mostly chopped with the mower) and placed several inches on top of the seed followed by a topping of straw. I also put straw around the outside of the beds to help prevent heave.

Today I took a peek at what was growing because I saw greens peeking through on the upper raised bed (I have 2 beds of garlic planted--each bed has roughly 90 cloves. I pulled back the straw and on the lower bed found the greens rather lacking in substance and fairly wet and slimy. The leaves under the straw is still there and I fear I might have put too many leaves on and that they kept the moisture on top of the bed. To make matters worse, the ground around the lower bed is very, very soggy. It has a nice stand of grass growing but the soil hasn't shed the water from a rain 3 days ago. I haven't dug up the cloves to look and see what shape it's in.

What should I do? Is there any chance these will recover and develop into bulbs? Should I move the raised bed and try to transplant what's in this bed? Or is this bed cashed for the year and I should concentrate on the higher bed and move it before planting again in the fall? I fear the location of this bed is just plain bad because of the tendency for water to collect in this corner and because the yard drains so poorly. Most of the cloves planted in this bed were purchased because I wanted to try some new varieties (new to me, that is).

Your advice is appreciated. Thank you.