Arkansas · Gulf Coast & Mississippi Lowlands
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Lower Arkansas-Fourche La Fave
then
Arkansas River
then
Mississippi River system
It arrives here
Gulf of Mexico
This water joins the largest drainage in North America and travels south for thousands of kilometres to the Gulf. What runs off the fields upstream of you arrives there too, which is why a dead zone the size of a small country forms off Louisiana each summer.
Basin 111102 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
74%
of the ten-year median for this date · 252.5 m³/s against 340.6 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 66 million years old — after the dinosaurs, as mammals and grasslands spread.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Cenozoic sedimentary rocks · Cenozoic
Paleocene sedimentary · Paleocene
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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Jackfork Sandstone · Pennsylvanian
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.