For Kids · The land and the sky · The ground under you
Tuscany · Mediterranean Europe · limestone country
Try it
Drag the spade down, or tap Dig deeper, through the leaves, the living topsoil and the subsoil, all the way to the bedrock that is really down there.
About 0 cm down
The grass
the top of the ground
Under the grass is a whole hidden world. Drag the spade down — or press Dig deeper — to find out what is down there.
Layer 0 of 5
It takes hundreds of years to make one centimetre of topsoil. The depths are typical — every place is different — and the ruler is squashed at the bottom so the rock fits on the screen.
Say it like this
Go outside: Dig a small hole in the garden and count how many worms live in one shovelful — then put them all back and fill it in.
The river right now
39%
of the ten-year median for this date · 4.6 m³/s against 11.8 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 185% more water by the end of the week.
Under your feet
About 101 million years old — from the age of the dinosaurs.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Late Cretaceous limestone · Late Cretaceous
Mesozoic sedimentary rocks · Cretaceous
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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Try it
Drag the spade down, or tap Dig deeper, through the leaves, the living topsoil and the subsoil, all the way to the bedrock that is really down there.
About 0 cm down
The grass
the top of the ground
Under the grass is a whole hidden world. Drag the spade down — or press Dig deeper — to find out what is down there.
Layer 0 of 5
It takes hundreds of years to make one centimetre of topsoil. The depths are typical — every place is different — and the ruler is squashed at the bottom so the rock fits on the screen.
Say it like this
Go outside: Dig a small hole in the garden and count how many worms live in one shovelful — then put them all back and fill it in.
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.