Ontario · Boreal Forest & Shield · schist country
Where your water goes
Your sub-basin
Missinaibi-Mattagami
then
Hudson Bay Seaboard
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 04L (Canadian sub-drainage area)
The river right now
101%
of the ten-year median for this date · 12.3 m³/s against 12.2 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 19% over the week ahead.
Under your feet
About 2.8 billion years old — older than free oxygen in the air, and older than almost any fossil.
All the kinds of rock, and how each one forms →
Archean sedimentary rocks · Neoarchean
Neoarchean volcanic: mafic rocks · Neoarchean
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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Mafic to intermediate metavolcanic rocks · Mesoarchean
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.