North Carolina · Appalachian Highlands
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Santee
then
Atlantic Ocean Seaboard
It arrives here
Atlantic Ocean
Everything that falls here works its way east and north to the Atlantic. It is the drainage that carried the fur trade inland and the log drives back out, and the one Atlantic salmon and American eel still use — the eel travelling the whole length of it to spawn in the Sargasso Sea.
Basin 030501 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
82%
of the ten-year median for this date · 1.6 m³/s against 2 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 dropping, roughly 56% over the week ahead.
Under your feet
About 541 million years old — from the age of the first forests, amphibians and reptiles.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Paleozoic intrusive rocks · Paleozoic
Granitic Rock · Ordovician
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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Neoproterozoic volcanic: undivided volcanic rocks · Neoproterozoic
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
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.