Saskatchewan · Prairies & Great Plains · sandstone country
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Qu'Appelle
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 05J (Canadian sub-drainage area)
The river right now
1303%
of the ten-year median for this date · 3.8 m³/s against 0.3 normally
very highWell above normal. The river is moving gravel and wood, the banks are undercut and unreliable, and this is the state in which people drown. Watch it from the bank. It is dropping, roughly 40% over the week ahead.
Under your feet
About 101 million years old — from the age of the dinosaurs.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Mesozoic sedimentary rocks · Late Cretaceous
Late Cretaceous sedimentary · Campanian
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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Bearpaw Fm of Montana Gp · Cretaceous
The soil it made
What that means
Easy ground for most vegetables and fruit. Iron and manganese start to get harder to reach at the top of this band, which shows up as yellowing between the veins on young leaves.
Happy here without a fight
Brassicas, beets, spinach, peas, lilacs, clematis and most herbs. Hydrangeas come out pink.
If you want the rest
Leave it. If acid-lovers are the point, grow them in containers or a made-up bed rather than fighting the whole garden.
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.