Minnesota · Boreal Forest & Shield · granite country
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Rainy and Winnipeg
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 090300 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
68%
of the ten-year median for this date · 151.8 m³/s against 221.6 normally
lowRunning low for the date. Water is clear and fish are spooky, so lighter line and a longer cast earn their keep. Wading is easy; the fish noticing you is the problem. It is steady through the week ahead.
Under your feet
About 2.8 billion years old — older than free oxygen in the air, and older than almost any fossil.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Granitic intrusion · Neoarchean
Neoarchean plutonic: undivided granitic rocks · Neoarchean
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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Archean sedimentary rocks · Neoarchean
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
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.