Water Crisis?

Water should be no problem on our land -- or so we have been told. Unfortunately. we appear to have run the well almost dry, leaving us with little water to keep the vegetables irrigated.

It looks as if there was some kind of leak in the water system last Sunday night. Or perhaps some kids had opened a valve or something. Anyway, we found an unexplained damp patch in one area of the garden on the same day that the pump started trying to pull up air. The water level had gone down to the level of the inlet pipe. Of course, we might have expected something like this. It's been the dryest period on record, we have builders taking large quantities of water, and we are watering our vegetables daily. Still it is a bit of a shock to find that we are short of water, and may have to choose which parts of the garden survive. Unfortunately, the grass which has taken so much effort to get going may be the first victim, as it's hard to justify such a purely ornamental element in the garden in a drought....

The well is about 2m in diameter. Today we plumbed it with a length of string and a weight (a large spanner). Total depth is about 14-15m, but there is only 1m of water in the bottom! (We had been told that there's always been many metres of depth in the past.) Part way down the well is a concrete platform; our neighbour Alice said, perhaps seriously, it was a great place for a picnic on the hottest days of summer! One of these days we'll venture down for a better look. For the moment, though, we are hoping for a period of rain that might raise the water table a little and refill our well!