Michigan · Great Lakes & St. Lawrence Lowlands
Fall · September 16, 2026
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Southeastern Lake Michigan
then
St. Lawrence River
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 040500 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
204%
of the ten-year median for this date · 3.7 m³/s against 1.8 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 rising — about 110% more water by the end of the week.
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 sedimentary rocks · Paleozoic
Serpukhovian sedimentary · Serpukhovian
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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Bayport Limestone · Mississippian
The soil it made
What that means
The sweet spot for a vegetable garden. Nearly every nutrient is at its most available somewhere in this band, which is why it is the number every soil guide tells you to aim at.
Happy here without a fight
Almost everything: tomatoes, beans, squash, lettuce, apples, most perennials and most lawn grasses.
If you want the rest
Nothing needed. Compost keeps it here; heavy lime would push it past useful.
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.