Starting a Garden

There are a lot of people who advertise something like "Get your garden off to a good start with free manure!"

Don't Do It! or at least don't go into it blind.

Most of the free manure around here is fresh horse manure. "Fresh" means that it's less than a year+ old and hasn't been hot-composted.
This will have devastating effects on your garden, yard, or anyplace else it happens to land.
Manure from large livestock carries weed seeds. I'm not talking about grass or a few dandelions. I'm talking about mutant, everlasting, fast-spreading, inch-thick-stalk weeds that laugh at anything less than Agent Orange.

If you don't want to wait a couple years for that horse manure to compost down, your best bet is to start your garden with store-bought fertilizer.

The majority of the soil in Cold Springs is high alkali.
If you don't put something in the soil, your plants will not get the nutrients they need. Specifically: iron and phosphorus, along with a few others.
The best soil amendment I can suggest is peat moss... but even that might not be enough. A few bags of *well-composted* steer manure will also help.

However, how you water is also key.
If you use a sprinkler system, the "desert concrete" here is infamous for rising to the top of your garden and creating a water barrier. All that precious H2O will just run off the crust, leaving your plants thirsty.

Your better bet is to use a soaker hose for watering, anyway.

Your *best* bet is to surround the plants with something to hold the water in. Mulch is good, but a wall is better.

I have a load of the basic black pots that plants are purchased in. You know, the kind that a lot of people just throw away? Dig a hole, cut the bottom off the pot, stick it in the hole, fill with amended topsoil, plant. Using this method, you save cost on good soil, fertilizer, and water.
You can usually find people giving those pots away on sites like Freecycle or Craig's List.