I love all your water features. The mosquitoes don't carry you away do they? I like that $50 fountain your husband found too. Kind of formal but still very pretty and one heck of a buy. I really had to laugh at your ants are my friend post. lol! The things kids come up with!

Hi gardengal, Do you have any concerns about children falling down in there? Also, there might be certain laws about messing with old wells......I just don't know. I don't know if you are presently risking contaminating your water source by keeping this well open.??? I would find out those issues first. Can you just walk up to this big hole and look down 18'? That's a little scary! I think I would be tempted to seal it off or fill it in, and then just have a water feature wherever you wanted it. Good luck, and don't fall in! :) P.S......if you wanted to maintain this as a working well, I would suggest having an old fashioned priming hydrant installed, and covering up the space around it, for safety sake. Gardenweb has a great plumbing forum that might be able to give you better suggestions. (no offense to anyone here).

We have 2 small ponds at our house. One day I walked out on our deck to check the one by the house out and saw a snake slither out into my daylilies behind the top waterfall section. So of course my hubby wasn't home and there was no way I was letting that thing stay so close to the house so I decided to find him and trap him. I slowly pulled almost every rock away from the pond form and couldn't find the rascal. When hubby got home he was not very happy about the condition of HIS pond, and we ended up having to rebuild the whole top part again. Oh well. I love to poke and prod and dig and .... I was that way as a kid and always will be. Yesterday I was down at the other pond. A backhoe took a couple scoops out when we built our house and the hole was spring fed until it stopped running a couple years ago. It still gets water to it by way of underground piping from our downspouts and rain runoff but this summer has been hard on it since it's been so dry. We had put feeder fish in it two years ago and there are tons of frogs so I decided to go down to it and scoop as many as I could with my daughter's nets. To my suprise, the first thing I saw was a SNAKE! Yikes! I had no idea where it went so I stood on a rock in the pond and scooped out every living thing I could not seeing him again thank goodness. I think he was a harmless water snake but they still give me the creeps. Today the water was gone but we pulled out all of the big fish and at least 100 frog tadpoles. I'm not worried about the frogs down there, they'll find a new home and once it rains the pond will fill back up. PS: Do I want to do this when I'm 50?

just another note... ... ... use the calculation of 300 GPH for each square inch of water flow. If your spillway is falling on to a smooth surface like flagstone then a water flow of 0.5-0.75 inches will be just fine, which means if your waterfall is 22 inches that comes out to 3,300 GPH, your pump, the best on the market right now, will give you that half inch of water. Now the rougher the creek bed the deeper the flow needs to be, so if you are sticking with this pump you will need to narrow the creek bed to increase the depth of water the larger the river rock the deeper the water. In addition the the greater the lift, the vertical from the pump to the top of the waterfall, will reduce the flow rate so don't make it too high or you will be disappointed in the amount of water flow. By the way this is one of the two best pumps on the market right now. At $0.10 a Kilowatt hour this pump only cost $0.03 and hour to run. The other pump that is great is its sister the AquaSurge Pro 5K-8K.