By placing your rain barrel beneath your rain gutter, you can catch the rain runoff from your house. This might require removing one or two of the tubes that reroute the rain to make your rain barrel fit.

One of the additional benefits of doing it this way means that whatever debris like leaves, will also get washed into your rain barrel, providing additional nutrients for your compost tea and for your plants.

Going cheap? A $5 trash can can get you on composting and watering quickly and without a heavy investment. A trash can rain-catching, compost tea-making set-up is relatively narrow, easy to install beneath a rain gutter or can be located into tight spaces close to a house or other building to catch water runoff directly from the roof.

Waste not, want not. Just because there are no longer any children in your life to splash around during the summer, doesn’t mean you have to throw away those old kiddie pools, or even buy a new one.

You can make use of these in a very natural way, they make great makeshift ponds, which will provide even more nutrients for your plants by adding fish and using the fish emulsion as a natural fertilizer. When placed well, it can’t refill itself using rainwater.

The easiest way to catch rain without a gutter is to provide a nice, wide pool or pond that is located beneath the open sky with no coverings. You can increase the convenience of this composting “pond” by placing it directly in your garden or edible landscape and tossing weeds and whatnots in it as you do your daily maintenance.

During a heavy rain, it will fill and then over run, spreading its organic goodness to the surrounding landscape, though you can also water by hand with a bucket or watering can if you can’t wait for rain or have newly installed plants in need of a bit of water and fertilizer.

All the materials you throw into your rain bucket, barrel, kiddie pool, will–eventually– break down. The only thing to keep in mind is that, some things, like leftover chicken bones and other meat-leftovers, will take more time to breakdown than plant matter.