Water water everywhere

Watering the alloment was always going to be a big job. Fortunately at the Westend site we have access to wells dug all over the site. All these are fully brick built and have semi rotary hand pumps for getting the water. The nearest deep well to my site is approximately 50m away which is quite a distance and certainly very difficult to carry much water to and from. With the depth of the plot an extra 30m it all adds up. Early on my neighbour discovered an unused well very close to our plots but after further inspection its too shallow and not worth the effort to restore it.

There was only one option left - water butts. I was really lucky to find a local independent garden centre selling water butts for £10 each. Normally you can expect to pay at least twice that from DIY stores. The slight downside is that they are ex olive barrels so have a certain aroma shall we say! despite this they were quite clean so didn't atke much effort with the hose pipe to become fit for use. I got three in the end with a total capacity of 660 litres. The plinth they stand on was made from salvaged concrete at the allotment site. A big thanks to Dave for helping me carry these lumps because there was no way I could move them on my own.

So the final bit of getting the water from the pump to the barrels because we couldn't bucket it. I bought a 1" pipe from ebay for £60 which has been my most expensive item by a long way. Its probably meant any savings we were going to make are well and truly gone but I like to see it as an investment instead.....ahem!! Its 60m long so has plenty of slack and by using a foam insulation sleeve and jubilee clip it clamp securely to the well pipe.

All in all the sytem works really well. Theres no water loss and it takes somewhere in the region of 800 pumps to fill a single barrel. Three barrels later and thats a decent workout! All the barrels have taps fitted but I've found its much quicker to stick a bucket in the top so they've had little use. Who knows maybe I'll get round to fitting a gravity fed dripper to water the pumpkins and squash but for now I'll use the manual method. All I need now is an eaiser way of cranking the pump!!