Ontario · Great Lakes & St. Lawrence Lowlands
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
North and west Lake Ontario
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 02H (Canadian sub-drainage area)
The river right now
116%
of the ten-year median for this date · 7.1 m³/s against 6.1 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 rising — about 32% 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
Early Silurian sedimentary · Early Silurian
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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Clinton Group; Cataract Group · Early Silurian
· Ordovician
The soil it made
What that means
Easy ground for most vegetables and fruit. Iron and manganese start to get harder to reach at the top of this band, which shows up as yellowing between the veins on young leaves.
Happy here without a fight
Brassicas, beets, spinach, peas, lilacs, clematis and most herbs. Hydrangeas come out pink.
If you want the rest
Leave it. If acid-lovers are the point, grow them in containers or a made-up bed rather than fighting the whole garden.
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.