New Mexico · Deserts & Dry Basins · river deposits country
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Rio Grande-Elephant Butte
then
Rio Grande
It arrives here
Gulf of Mexico
This water joins the largest drainage in North America and travels south for thousands of kilometres to the Gulf. What runs off the fields upstream of you arrives there too, which is why a dead zone the size of a small country forms off Louisiana each summer.
Basin 130202 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
39%
of the ten-year median for this date · 8.6 m³/s against 22.3 normally
very lowWell below normal for the date. Fish crowd into whatever deep, cool water is left, which makes them findable and also makes them fragile — a fish played hard in warm shallow water often does not recover. It is rising — about 103% more water by the end of the week.
Under your feet
About 126,000 years old — from the ice ages and since — the most recent chapter.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Quaternary sedimentary · Quaternary
· Holocene
Bedrock and soil figures are modelled from national geological surveys and global soil mapping, at a resolution of a few hundred metres — right for the shape of a district, not for a particular garden. River discharge is modelled, not gauged. For anything that matters, dig a hole and look.
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Alluvium · Late Pleistocene
Cenozoic sedimentary rocks · Miocene
The soil it made
What that means
Limey ground. Iron, manganese and zinc are chemically present but hard for roots to take up, so acid-loving plants go yellow between the veins no matter how much you feed them.
Happy here without a fight
Lavender, sage, thyme, clematis, lilac, brassicas, beets and most stone fruit.
If you want the rest
Chelated iron treats the symptom. Sulphur lowers pH but slowly and not permanently. The honest answer is to grow what suits it and put the blueberries in a pot.
Working it
A balance of sand, silt and clay — the texture that holds enough water to matter and still drains, which is why loam is the one everybody wants.