Guy, we never did get that well situation taken care of properly. Still no water available on site unless I go down to the ditch with a bucket.
But ... I'm thinking of getting a drilling hook-up to go on the backhoe, with various augers, this spring. Eventually I will ned to think of fencing, and then there are new trees to think of planting and it's neighborly to offer to help the guy down the road, you know. Anyway, as high as my water table is, an 8' hole will fill up and stay full, so if I can rig a drill to go 20', I should be good.
In the meantime, I've been watching videos on how to create a manual pump from PVC that will work at depths below 25', by building in one-way valves made with ball bearings and washers.
Speaking of the ditch, the county came through and cleaned off the rest of the trees and re-dredged it, cleaning up the mess left behind in '05. Worst case scenario, I buy a quarter mile of water hose and pump it up from the ditch with a car waterpump. The place where I usually "garden" is about 800' from the water source. But that could change, now that old debris has been shoved around again and fresh silty clay has been dumped over the top well down from where I had started creating hugelbeds. They were doing all this work during hunting season, so I might have to show up in late March / early April with seeds and a pocket full of hope.