Skyler Kvitek

S Bengi: you mean skip water storage all together and just attach drip irrigation directly to the well pump outlet? That could work, if I could find a way to set up a timer to turn the pump on and off. I don't have much electrical knowledge (I barely know the difference between DC and AC). Is attaching a solar panel and a timer to a well pump a relatively simple process?
We definitely could grow stuff year round, with proper cultivar selection and maybe some cold frames to keep the worst weather off some of the more fragile plants. Though for now I just want to focus on spring through early autumn.

Here's a map of our property (if I attached it to the post properly...)
The red boxes are the areas we plan to cultivate into veggie beds, the yellow box is where I have a couple hugel mounds and will probably make more, the green circles are the big slash piles I mentioned, the blue star is the well and generator, the purple star is the cistern.
As for elevation...Laura, do you recall if there was ever a digital version of the elevation map for our land? All the topographic maps I'm finding online aren't nearly detailed enough. They just show that it generally slopes down (very very gradually) from the southwest towards the river. But I know there are all kinds of little dips and high spots all over the pasture.

Hi there, I'm one of the owners of the property in question.

Rhys:
The solar powered pump on a timer was my first thought, but after looking around a bit, I can't find a solar pump setup that costs less than $700, which is out of our price range at the moment.
Definitely something that I want to have in the future, though. (The idea of re-purposing the old pump for the cistern is a great idea that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks!)

Dave:
The main issue is simply "How to have enough water to sustain roughly 1/8 acre of mixed vegetables between April and October."
Solutions being within the constraints of the only source of electricity on the property being a diesel generator that must be started and stopped manually, and the well is very slow and relatively shallow.
I'll try to get a useful map worked up later today.

Any help is welcome and appreciated