Hmm, Los Lunas NM. You're near the Rio Grande River? At least you might be able to afford to irrigate!
I see "Bosque Farms" nearby, so it must be possible to grow something there. Whatever feed store or farm coop they use is a good place to find out what the local Dos and Don'ts are.
The ATP member map shows that
@hemiaym lives fairly near you, he or she may have some pointers for dealing with local soil.
http://garden.org/users/member...
Someone in the SW forum mentioned agricultural sulfur, so I guess you have alkaline clay.
Here's a thread in the SW Gardening to forum to start with:
The thread "Preparing the landscape for cool weather plantings.." in
Southwest Gardening forum
Their most active threads seem to be the monthly "chat" threads.
Oh, yes: local extension and university ag departments. The government is shut down today, but maybe tomorrow you can click on "Coop Extension Finder" in my signature block and find multiple local websites, support groups, etc to get you started.
I would love to hear back from you, especially if you find any advice that does NOT start: "First, make a lot of compost".
I happened to blab about compost recently over in the "All Things" forum.
The thread "Musing about Compost" in
Soil and Compost forum
