Its Raining . . .

Spring has arrived.  And with it the spring rains are here.  Today has been shower after shower, some of it with large rain drops.  Lord knows, we need it, the lakes are way down.  The summer drought has caused a concern about lake levels and the use of water for lawns, etc.

Conservation measures are in place almost everywhere to save water.  We all carefully use it.  We are personally fortunate in that we have our own irrigation well.  Some say we too much obey the conservation rules about watering.  I do not think so, that is why we had a well installed, to avoid such things and not to use city water for the lawns.  There is a water district now but we are all grandfathered into the district, so do not have to go backwards to their present day standards.

For instance, they require you to have two acres to drill a well.  We have slightly less than an acre lot so under the new rules would not be able to have a well.  Since we do have one, if we run into trouble with our well, we can redrill our well if necessary.  That is part of the grandfather clause.

Any, the aquifer is getting recharged along with the lakes.  The rain is quite wide spread and is coming up to us from the Southwest Texas area, probably from Mexico and the Pacific vice anything from the  Gulf of Mexico to the South of us.

There are two aquifers under us, the Paluxey and another one.  The Paluxey is about 200 feet down, have to drill through two layers of chalk (same stuff as the Austin Chalk that is thousands of feet below Pointe Coupee Parish).  Parts of the Paluxey to the East of us, under the Western edge of Fort Worth around Carswell AFB and the Lockheed plant is contaminated.  We here do not have that problem.

The water is potable but has grit in it.  The grit is microscopic in nature but will mess up some of the irrigation water valves.  I had to replace all of ours with so called "dirty water" valves.  The internal guts of the dirty water valves back flush themselves and do not have the grit build up in them.  The clean water valves begin to seep and leak through and one sees water sprinklers dribbling water when they should be cut off.  Our neighbor suffers from this all the time and has not figured out the problem.

Any rate the rains are welcome.  I just cannot go fly Radio Control in the stuff.