Pennsylvania · Appalachian Highlands
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Allegheny
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 050100 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
238%
of the ten-year median for this date · 499 m³/s against 209.4 normally
highRunning high for the date. Water will be pushy and coloured, fish will be tucked into the slack water at the edges and behind obstructions, and crossings that are normally easy are not. It is rising — about 25% 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
Gzhelian sedimentary · Missourian
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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Glenshaw Formation · 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.