Alberta · Western Mountains & Interior Plateaus · sandstone country
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Bow
then
Nelson River
It arrives here
Hudson Bay
An enormous, cold, inland sea is the destination — water from here flows north rather than south, which surprises most people who look at a map for the first time. It is ice-covered for much of the year, so the whole system is on a short, violent, snowmelt-driven schedule.
Basin 05B (Canadian sub-drainage area)
The river right now
154%
of the ten-year median for this date · 69.8 m³/s against 45.2 normally
highRunning high for the date. Water will be pushy and coloured, fish will be tucked into the slack water at the edges and behind obstructions, and crossings that are normally easy are not. It is dropping, roughly 13% over the week ahead.
Under your feet
About 66 million years old — after the dinosaurs, as mammals and grasslands spread.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Paleogene sedimentary · Paleogene
Cenozoic sedimentary rocks · Paleogene
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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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
Fine and fertile, holding water better than sand without clay's stickiness. It caps over in heavy rain, so it wants a mulch or a cover crop rather than being left bare.