For a couple of years I had a garden spot away from my house, with no water supply available so if I wanted to supplement rainfall I had to haul gallon jugs of water. To make my watering efficient, when I planted my peppers & tomatoes in the spring, I dug down and buried empty gallon plastic jugs, one between each plant. I had poked 4-5 holes in the bottom of each, of course, and left the caps on until later in the summer. Once the weather warmed, and after a good soaking rain, I mulched the beds 4-6" deep with chopped leaves, being sure to cover the tops of the (so far empty and still capped) bottles to protect them from the sun since I had found that the plastic degrades and becomes brittle when exposed to the sun. (In previous years, just cultivating around the bottles inevitably resulted in my breaking the tops off by midsummer.) When the weather reached a point where I actually needed to water, I cleared the mulch away for the moment and poured a gallon of water into each buried bottle. I set the cap loosely back atop each bottle to keep the leaf debris from falling in and clogging the exit holes in the bottom, then pulled the mulch back up to protect the plastic. I did not care about how long it took for the bottle to empty-- it seemed like a gallon or two a week per plant was sufficient, and the best part is that by burying the bottles the water went right down to the root zone where it was most effective. As for using wall-o-waters, since I had gotten some free from a friend, I tried them last year with 3 really early tomato plants I started specifically to experiment with. While they survived a good bit of frosty weather, in the end the plants I had started weeks later and planted out a month after the first ones when the weather had warmed quickly caught up to the wall-o-water ones and all the tomatoes pretty much bloomed & set fruit at the same time & rate. So my conclusion is that it was satisfying to my eager gardener's soul to be out planting early, but it really made no difference in overall plant performance. I have found the same to be true with early plantings of such things as peas and salad crops, too. Early plantings may survive, but later plantings quickly catch up and may even surpass earlier ones that have been stressed by the weather.

You can and should add leaves to the compost pile, but do understand that leaves take a fairly long time to decompose. Leaves are considered a 'brown' and you will want to add lots of greens to the pile to get those leaves breaking down faster. My personal opinion is that leaves are too valuable to gardens to ever waste them. If you have a lawn, consider mulching the leaves into the lawn with the lawn mower. Of course if you have lots of leaves you have to be careful not to smother the lawn with too deep a layer of leaves. Any extras can go on the beds for mulch. If you still have more left, they can go in the compost pile and if you still have more they can be bagged and allowed to decompose on their own over the course of a year or two. If you still have more consider advertising them as free for the taking. Lots of gardeners in newly developed areas have no established trees of their own and are dependent upon other people's leaves. It may sound funny, but many are too apprehensive about just taking other people's leaves that are on the curbside. Giving them an invitation might just get them all new homes.

I agree with oakleyok regarding the window treatment. Is there anything you can do to completely cover the white that shows along the top and both sides of the windows? Perhaps panels that hang straight down on the ends and a valance that goes across the whole top of the window.

The kits are expensive because they save many, many hours that it takes to make swaged end connections. They also conceal the tensioning device inside the end post, so the only thing visible is cable. If you are thinking of using the saddle type of cable end, consider the sharp protrusion of the cut cable.