North Carolina · Appalachian Highlands
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
French Broad-Holston
then
Ohio River
then
Mississippi River system
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 060101 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
81%
of the ten-year median for this date · 18.5 m³/s against 23 normally
normalAbout what it should be for the date. The river is doing its ordinary work — sorting gravel, feeding its banks and moving fish around at the pace everything in it is adapted to. It is steady through the week ahead.
Under your feet
About 1.0 billion years old — laid down before anything with a shell or a backbone existed.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Neoproterozoic-Cambrian sedimentary · Neoproterozoic
Ashe Metamorphic Suite and Tallulah Falls Formation; Muscovite-biotite gneiss · Neoproterozoic
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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Mesoproterozoic crystalline metamorphic rocks · Mesoproterozoic
The soil it made
What that means
Comfortable for woodland plants and a little tight for the vegetable garden. Brassicas sulk, and clubroot is worse at this end of the scale.
Happy here without a fight
Blueberries, raspberries, potatoes, rhubarb, carrots, most conifers, azaleas and hydrangeas — which come out blue here.
If you want the rest
A dressing of lime in autumn brings the vegetable beds up without touching the fruit. Leave the blueberries well alone.
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.