Missouri · Central Hardwoods & Interior Plateaus
Fall · September 15, 2026
Saint Louis, Missouri
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Upper Mississippi-Meramec
then
Mississippi 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 071401 (USGS hydrologic unit)
The river right now
95%
of the ten-year median for this date · 3,800.9 m³/s against 3,980.1 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 rising — about 16% 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
Serpukhovian sedimentary · Serpukhovian
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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Meramecian Series · Mississippian
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.