British Columbia · Pacific Maritime
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Vancouver Island
then
Pacific Ocean Seaboard
It arrives here
Pacific Ocean
West, down some of the steepest drainage on the continent, and then straight into the Pacific. These are the salmon rivers: five species run up them from the sea to spawn and die, and the carcasses carry ocean nitrogen back into the forest.
Basin 08H (Canadian sub-drainage area)
The river right now
80%
of the ten-year median for this date · 4.3 m³/s against 5.4 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 steady through the week ahead.
Under your feet
About 85 million years old — from the age of the dinosaurs.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Nanaimo Group · Late 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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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
Water runs straight through, so it dries fast and warms early — you can work it days after rain and sow ahead of heavier ground, but it needs watering and feeding more often because both wash out.