Tennessee · Central Hardwoods & Interior Plateaus
Fall · September 16, 2026
Nashville, Tennessee
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Lower Cumberland
then
Ohio 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 051302 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
85%
of the ten-year median for this date · 193.5 m³/s against 228.4 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 dropping, roughly 11% over the week ahead.
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
Late Ordovician sedimentary · Late Ordovician
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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Nashville Group; Bigby-Cannon Limestone and Hermitage Formation · Ordovician
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.