Jamie Chevalier

Erba stella is mild, doesn't have hairy, dirty, or otherwise unusable parts to scrub off, and is hardy to zone 5.

Perpetual Spinach is a type of chard that is hardy to zone 7 (and I've heard of it surviving in zone 5 with mulch and very good drainage.) It has the unusual trait of being even milder in flavor than the regular garden version.

Old Timey Blue Collards are perennial for me in zone 7, and Cottager's Kale often is too. Quail Seeds has all of these

Rhubarb doesn't have to be sweetened unless you want it that way. It can go savory too, and be the sour element in salads, condiments (think pickles without having to make pickles) main dishes, and soups. It can be used in any dish where you would normally have a sourish flavor--baked pork with apples, sauerkraut dishes, salsas, pickle-type condiments (Just salt and season the rhubarb as the sour part is already there) Chinese hot and sour soup, etc. You can cook it with other vegetables like cabbage or beets to give a  "lemon juice" effect. And you can use it to make drinks.

One mild-flavored perennial that doesn't require a bunch of special preparation is Erba Stella (aka minutina, buckhorn plantain, etc. Latin name is Plantago coronopus.)   I seldom see it mentioned but it is mild enough to be included in high-end salad mixes, and has a crunchy, texture and slightly salty flavor that makes it easy to use and like. You just cut it and throw it into salad, soup, etc. It is hardy to down to zone 5. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p261/Erba_Stella%2C_Minutina.html

Perennial/biennial/annual aren't hard and fast categories. Several of our common vegetables are perennials in their ancient homeland, or in certain climates. Tomatoes and peppers are often perennial in fairly frost-free climates. Runner beans and jicama both make tubers that overwinter in mild climates. As you get into colder winters, the number of possibilities decreases, but one promising place to look is at plants that are normally biennial. These are plants that overwinter, then flower and die, usually around midsummer. Cabbage kale, onions, beets and carrots are all biennial vegetables. They already have the hardiness to overwinter in the normal course of being biennial. So from overwintering once to doing it several times is not such a big step. Often they have ancestors that were perennial, like Sea Beet, the ancestor of beets and chards.

If perennialism is an important trait to you, it's well worth experimenting, especially with crops that are traditional in small homestead or cottage situations. In situations where the field or garden is all plowed every spring and replanted, then weeded or cultivated, there is selection pressure for fast emergence of seeds, fast maturity, and annual or biennial habit. This is the kind of evolutionary pressure that turns a perennial like Sea Beet into a biennial like table beets. In more relaxed garden situations, where trees, shrubs, flowers and crops are jumbled, the traits for perennial survival may survive. If you want to find crops that produce palatable food in usable quantities, a good place to start looking is among domesticated garden plants that have not been as intensively cropped.

Kale is an example. The varieties that have been developed for farms, (like Vates, developed by the Virginia agricultural experiment station,) rarely perennialize, even in maritime climates. On the other hand, Cottager's Kale  is an ancient variety from England that still throws a proportion of perennial plants. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p514/Cottager%27s_Kale.html  Western Front is a modern kale bred specifically for homesteaders that also has some seedlings that choose to go perennial. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p492/Western_Front_Red_Kale.html

My climate (zone 7) is mild enough to overwinter collards,  which are an even richer field for experiment, since there were so many that were grown only by one or two families for their own use. Several of these have been rescued by the Heirloom Collards Project, https://heirloomcollards.org/ as well as  Southern Exposure Seeds, and The Seed Savers Exchange. Old Timey Blue Collards https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p337/Old-Timey_Blue_Collards.html  are perennial for me, and I've seen other (unnamed) varieties around old homesteads.

Chard, arugula, chicory, and celery all have varieties that are closer to the wild and produce a high proportion of perennial plants. Older varieties of leeks do sometimes as well.
https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p9/Perpetual_Spinach_%28Leafbeet%29_Chard.html
https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p295/Perennial_Arugula%2C_Rucola_selvatica%2C_Wild_Rocket_%22Sylvetta.html
https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p472/Chicory_%22Trieste_Sweet%22.html
https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p10/Leaf_Celery.html

There are obvious reasons why people are interested in perennials--it's great to have a crop each year without replanting. Further, perennials often produce in early spring when they are particularly welcome.  Rhubarb, artichokes, and asparagus all provide the quality, flavor, and quantity to justify their space.  But it's easy to assume a perennial will be better when that may not be the case. I don't get quality collard leaves in the spring and summer for example. The plant is too busy flowering and making seed, and it sucks energy from the leaves to fuel seed production. If I want lots of top-quality leaves, I plant new every year and harvest the first-year vegetative growth. Similarly, market gardeners usually replant salad perennials like sorrel, chicory, erba stella, and miner's lettuce rather continuing to crop and cut the same plants. The younger leaves are milder, juicier, and produced in greater quantity. If it's quality leaves you're after, a young plant is what will produce it quickly and well.

Sterile hybrids like Purple Tree Collards avoid this problem, but there are not many such plants, and they are less hardy than their seed-bearing relatives. Like everything, it's a trade-off. And like everything, there is work that could be done to select for less reproduction and more vegetative growth. In my opinion, and with my situation, the amount of work to prepare many perennials, and the smaller quantities they produce over a shorter season than annuals, makes them an adjunct rather than a staple in my garden. If I were in a different climate, or I preferred scrubbing small roots to taking care of seedlings, the balance would be different.

Self-sowing annuals are a good compromise in many gardens. Mustards, turnip greens, cilantro, and miner's lettuce are all self-sowers in my garden. However, as some people in this thread have noted, mulch or established plants or compaction all can prevent self-sowers from germinating. The fact is that most of our food plants are species that thrive in disturbed soil.
Even the wild miner's lettuce on my land moves around, depending on where it can find bare or disturbed soil that hasn't been taken over by grasses. After two years it usually disappears, having been crowded out by stronger more competitive plants. Human intervention has always been a necessary condition for abundance of human food--from the intentional burning done by California native peoples, to the intentional planting of native fruit trees in the jungle, to the digging and spreading of root and tuber crops in various cultures, to the creation of a plowed seedbed. Each gardener needs to decide the type of interventions that suit their situation, preferences, physical capabilities, resources, and climate.

California and other summer-dry climates with huge populations of burrowing rodents are pretty much the opposite of Sepp Holtzer's conditions of high rainfall and low temperatures. I'd be surprised if the same solution worked both places.

What has worked well for us is slightly sunken beds, which retain any water they receive. This was a technique used by Southwestern native farmers to concentrate and hold on to water. In the Southwest, that water would come from rainstorms. In California, it comes from irrigation in summer.

I think it's also worth keeping in mind that native peoples here did not make gardens or farms in our sense of the word. They definitely manipulated the environment to optimize the wild species that were most useful. This was a form of land management more sophisticated and large-scale than what we know as farming. But farms and gardens of many introduced crop plants in a small intensive space have never been a part of the Pacific coast landscape until they were introduced by European settlers and subsidized by pumped water.

Even in the Mediterranean parts of Europe, the most important crop plants, like wheat, fava beans, and chick peas, were grown primarily during the wet winter season, not in summer. In Spain and Portugal, for example, the agricultural year revolved around wheat and greens in the winter, with cork oaks and wild grasses providing forage for livestock. The summer gardens we know--tomatoes, squash, etc, were developed in the summer-rain climates of Eastern and Southern North America. In California, such gardens depend to some extent on us recreating that climate.

Thanks to Jen and all who have tried the hugel approach here. In exploration, documenting obstacles and dead ends is more important in some ways than finding the successful route.

I would think again about what you put at the margin of the chicken run.

Whatever you plant will be getting a huge dose of nitrogen, as the roots will spread under the chicken run and soak it up.
Raspberries will survive and thrive on a diet of compost and mulch. Even in very leached-out soil, I've had raspberries taller than 8 ft by mulching them with chunks screened out of half-done compost, seaweed, and leaves, with no other fertilizer.. Wood chips are another great mulch. Brambles like raspberries like a forest-type soil heavy on woody debris and fungi. Will Bonsall's invaluable book shows blackberrys taller than a shed roof, given nothing but wood chips.

What I'm getting at is that raspberries don't need that nitrogen-rich position. In fact, too much nitrogen may give you lots of leaves and not much fruit Or fruit that rots as soon as it ripens.

Any  fruit or flower crop will bear better when given a lot of potassium and phosphorus, but not so much nitrogen. Tomatoes and nasturtiums are classic example of this effect--they make lots of leaves but few flowers or fruit when given too much nitrogen. Root crops like nitrogen even less--it makes them forked, hairy, and prone to rot.

Crops that need nitrogen are the leaf and stem crops. Note that onion bulbs are leaf bases, not roots. And tubers like potatoes are actually stems, not roots. Both love nitrogen.

Trees are an exception to the rule. They can use a lot of nitrogen to make fast growth of their stems and branches, which then provides more fruiting sites. My chicken run hosts a plum tree which provides shade for the hens in summer, and fallen fruit for them to eat. In the fall, I put down a tarp and shake the plums down onto it, for drying or jam. Mulberries fall continuously rather than in a single harvest. They are loved by chickens, and can be another good choice for around the run. They bear on new wood, so you can cut them back without sacrificing the fruit. In the long run, the tree may not live as long as one raised under leaner conditions, but it started bearing 2 or 3 years earlier than usual, and bears heavy crops of good fruit.

A possibility I wouldn't overlook is to grow annuals that provide seeds for your hens. Unlike cows, sheep, etc, chickens are primarily seed-eaters, not leaf-eaters. Sunflowers, corn, millet, and sorghum are all big plants that can make a big crop with little fuss, and are loved by chickens. The extra nitrogen will delay cropping a bit, but you should still get nutrient-rich seeds for your flock. Also, being annuals, they won't make a permanent network of roots that keep you from removing the manure when you want to use it. Wapsie Valley Corn is a great choice for an open-pollinated feed corn extremely high in protein. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p396/Wapsie_Valley_Dent_Corn.html

Sorghum has the additional recommendation of being drought-tolerant. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p89/Ellen%27s_Red_Sorghum.html

And the protein in sunflowers makes chickens lay more eggs, so I'd include them in the mix. The black-seeded sunflowers used for oil and birdseed is the most prolific and useful for poultry. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p141/Oilseed_Sunflower.html  
It would be possible to grow Jerusalem Artichokes or Maximillian Sunflowers too. Both are perennial. I think they might not produce much seed with all that nitrogen--perennials usually don't. If you wanted the tubers or the stems and leaves, they would be good for that. The seeds are very small. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p470/Maximillian_Sunflower.html

"True Quince", (Cydonia oblonga) is an amazingly productive  perfect for homesteads. Survives summer heat with little to no irrigation, and winter flooding.
My apples are almost always wormy and often take a year off, but the little quince, with no care, just pumps out lots and lots of fruit every year with no pest damage whatsoever. There are grafted varieties, but I find that the seedlings are more productive. Far tastier than applesauce, the canned product is our winter staple. Drought-tolerant, and just the right size to make a spot of shade to sit by in summer, but not shade out big parts of the yard. I love them, and find the seeds sprout well if I just put them in a pot outside and leave it all winter. Here is a source for seeds: https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p579/Quince.html

Ellen Lewis wrote:Given your eastern location and your sunless area, I would go for medicinals from the eastern forest floor, such as golden seal, ginseng, wintergreen, black cohosh, blue cohosh, bloodroot, trillium...
There may be some edibles, too. Ramps are all I can think of right away.
I looked on the web for shade herbs, and most of them are really partial-sun herbs.
You could turn it into a mushroom bed.

I concur with the idea of growing shade-lovers, and I love the idea of growing things like goldenseal, but most of the ones mentioned are considered very difficult to grow, in part because they depend on an intact forest-floor ecosystem, which you would not be able to provide.

On the bright side, though, I would consider anything that has open sky above it to be "bright shade"----especially in regions where there are often clouds and humidity, which breaks up the light and makes it much less directional. Ironically, the shadows in the sunny West are darker, than they are further east, even as our sunlit areas are brighter. This effect is especially extreme in the rainforest areas of Alaska, where the overcast is so heavy that shadows don't really exist at all--all light is diffuse.

The point of that digression was that if nothing is overhead, you probably have enough sun for partial-shade plants. If you can have a small shrub rather than something herbaceous, I would suggest red currant. It's hardy to zone 5, and bears well in partial shade. You could espalier it to the brick if you wanted to. The root system is shallow, and as long as the site has decent drainage (no standing water) it should do well. Another possiblity is Caucasian Spinach Vine (Hablitzia) which is shade-loving, edible, and extremely hardy.

UNLESS--and this is a big unless--there is salt or other de-icing chemical used on the sidewalk and steps. That will kill most broadleaf plants in short order. If that is the case, asparagus would probably survive, but I for one wouldn't want to eat it from such a source. A fruit  with no soil contact and the detox capability of the plant protecting would be safer than sprouts that have to come up through polluted soil.  
I think you should consider seaside plants--beach pea, beach plum, beach cherry. And rugosa roses, which are an introduced plant (from Japan) that has naturalized on the beaches in New England. It has the largest rose hip of any rose species. Most seaside plants like some sun, but they are worth a try.

My husband build our cookstove. The original was light sheet steel, cut with a hacksaw (he wore out 12 of them) and riveted together with cut-off nails. When that rusted out, we paid a welder to recreate the design in steel plate. We had a cast-iron top from an old oil stove to build around, and so we designed it with the firebox on the front, and the oven door around on a different side. That way, the fire box ran along the back side of the oven, rather than along one side of it. There were smoke channels all around the top and sides of the oven, to heat it evenly, and the door was a stainless steel sheet pan 1" deep, filled with insulation and riveted to a piece of steel. So the oven cooked very evenly. There was a flap that opened or closed the smoke channels, worked by a rod that stuck out the front of the stove. In normal use, the smoke went straight from the firebox up the chimney. After a good draft was established, you could use the rod to close off the straight route to the chimney and send all the smoke and heat around the oven. It worked great.

It's worth mentioning the difference between cast iron and steel plate, as it's important to the performance and few people really understand the differences.
A lot of efficient modern stoves are build from steel plate. It's very strong, and can be welded together to make an airtight stove. The plate is both strong and forgiving--it will bend rather than break and is very solid. Salts and minerals will either not affect it, or affect only the surface. The downside of this strength and resilience is that it is not dimensionally stable--when heated it will expand a bit and the surface, which is not totally flat to begin with, will become wavy or bowed. This is problematic for a cooktop, as pans need a totally flat surface for good heat transfer.

Cast iron is very different. It is very stable. With heat, it does not bend, wiggle, wave or bow, so once it's machined to a flat surface, it stays flat. Rather than bend or warp, it will crack or break. This dimensional stability is due to it's crystalline structure.  The downside is that the structure is somewhat porous. That's why you can season your cast iron pan with oil--a bit of oil is absorbed by the pan as it cools. That porosity means that salty wood (driftwood for example)  or cardboard with colored (mineral) dyes on it will eventually be absorbed into the structure and corrode it. Unlike steel plate, it can't be welded together, so it's cast in single pieces that are then held together with fastenings and caulked with furnace cement.

As you might guess, many people believe that the best compromise is a welded steel body with a cast top.
You can certainly cook on a welded steel stove--but it's not ideal, and most of them are designed chiefly for heating the room.
You can certainly heat the house with a cast iron stove--but it will be harder to control because it has more points of entry for air. And if it's designed for cooking, the firebox may be quite small.

There are important design differences between stoves meant for heating and those meant for cooking.
A pure cookstove has a small firebox, so that the wood is very close to the stove top and a small fire will have a fast effect. I rented a place with a Waterford cookstove and it was truly impressive how fast you could go from a cold stove to hot coffee in the morning. Conversely, if you weren't around to feed that tiny firebox all day, the house got cold.

If you already have or can scrounge a stove, you can make it work. Like baking in the firebox of the that Fisher heating stove--that's a lovely piece of making-do and substituting skill and experience for equipment. However, if you are starting from scratch and looking for a stove, it's worthwhile thinking hard about what your actual needs are. Especially the large firebox/small firebox issue is one worth examining carefully. How long do you need the stove to run unattended? How much cooking will you realistically do?  If I were making a custom stove design, I would consider having a shelf or ledge on one side of the firebox to make a little cooking fire on. Then for heating you could load the larger firebox with big pieces that would go longer.

One final note. It's good for a stove to be controllable--you don't want your house to be overheated and your wood supply to be used up. On the other hand, I feel that too much is made of the "hold a fire all night" issue.

Our stove was well-built enough that we could indeed hold a fire all night if we needed to. But be aware that to do that, the stove has to be shut down so far that it's giving off virtually no heat, and creating a lot of pollution via smoke, creosote, etc.  Our preferred solution was to buy a really good big restaurant stockpot that held 7 to 10 gallons of water. We kept it on the stove, just sitting there providing hot water whenever we needed any. (no electric or gas water heater required.) Before bed we'd run a nice fire--not overheating the house, but getting it nice and cozy, and heating the water good and hot. Then we'd leave the stove on low but not totally shut-down. It would go out during the night, but the water would be hot, and would stay hot enough to heat the room somewhat. We found that the heat radiated by that hot water kept our cabin from freezing more effectively than keeping a fire all night. And we didn't have to deal with the build-up of dangerous creosote in the chimney (a major cause of stack fires, which are truly terrifying.)

The top (or a section of it) is kept polished.  Not spotless, but rust-free and smooth. It's like taking care of a cast-iron pan.
Have you ever looked at the cooking setup at a cafe or diner? The cook makes your fried eggs or hamburger or whatever on a cast-iron cooktop, not in a pan. The large surface means that dozens of orders of eggs and fried potatoes and such can be made at once. An increasing number of home ranges have built-in griddles as well. Using your woodstove is the same process, just with a different heat source.
Since it's a common thing in commercial kitchens, tools exist to keep the griddle clean.

For everyday cleaning, you scrape with a heavy spatula or with an implement--I don't know what they call it, but any restaurant supply house would--that's a rectangular blade with a wooden grip running along one long side. A scraper, I guess you'd call it. That gets off the big bits.
If needed you can clean and polish with griddle screens, and wipe clean with a rag. You could use any pot-scrubber, but the ones for griddles are made rigid and flat so you don't develop a wavy surface over time. You know those barbeque-cleaning pads they make in a plastic holder with a handle on top? They would work, but you can get a non-plastic version made for a flat griddle. Back when I used one, it was a metal holder with grit-impregnated disposable screens that last a long while. I think it took me years to use up a pack of screens.  Most of the time, just the scraper and a rag will do it.

There's also a tool for when the stovetop is very rusty and you're getting it into shape for cooking, or you need to recondition the surface. You'll need to do this even if you don't cook directly on the stovetop, as there's not much heat transfer from a rusty surface.  Pans sitting on a rusty stove don't heat up well, and you have to use far too much fuel, overheat the room, etc.  You can buy blocks of lava (or a synthetic equivalent) about the size and shape of a large brick. The sides are flat and level, so grinding your stovetop with the brick leaves you with a level surface, which is again important for heat transfer to your pans. You heat up the stove and then let the fire go out. When the stove is still warm, but not hot, you grind the stovetop with the stone, using some kind of oil or tallow as a lubricant. I use cheap vegetable oil, but anything will work--tallow, lard, crisco, etc, even mineral oil. When the rust and mess is off, and the stove is polished, wipe well with a rag (or paper--you can use your oily wiping cloth or paper for starting the next day's fire.) You'll probably need to use a bit more oil to remove all the grit. You can rinse with water if you want, making sure to dry the surface well so it doesn't rust. When starting the stove next day, there may be a bit of smoke for a minute, but if you keep wiping while it heats, there shouldn't be much. If you start with a new stove, or one in good condition, you may never need to do this, but many older stoves have rusty or pitted tops, and it's good to know how to remedy that.

On fishing boats and tugboats in the north, they still have oil-fired cookstoves that are like a woodstove with a diesel oil burner where the firebox would be in a wood stove. So marine supply houses in places like Seattle, Maine, or Northern European port cities would be familiar with the implements as well.

Tips from the 25 years I spent cooking on a wood stove:
The heat you get from a piece of fuel follows a curve that you can get to know and use. Adding a new piece of wood will at first lower the heat, as the fuel steams off any water in it and absorbs enough heat to start burning. When it first bursts into flame, the fire is consuming volatile compounds that flash off quickly. Then as the charred wood is consumed, the carbon in the wood releases a lot of heat energy which slowly declines as the piece is burned to ash. Adding small pieces often will maintain a high heat, whereas a single load of larger wood will slowly get very hot and then slowly cool down.

Experience with your own stove will tell you how long the delay is, and how long you can coast on the particular type of wood you use.  Baking should usually be done on a falling fire. That is, get the oven a bit hotter than you'll want it and then stoke it only minimally. When my eldest son was 10, he decided he wanted to learn to bake cakes. He made a small single-layer cake every day until he could get one to rise perfectly and brown evenly in the wood-burning oven. It was a great lesson in scientific method.

Here's a good trick to go from medium cruising heat to a hot stove for a bout of cooking without using too much wood : 10-20 minutes before you want to start cooking, put several small pieces of wood onto the coals in the firebox  and shut the stove down. The wood will absorb heat and lose moisture. Then when you open the stove up, the extra oxygen will be fed onto fuel that is already hot and dry, ready to burst into flame all at once rather than gradually. The ultimate test of stovetop cooking is making popcorn--if the heat isn't high enough right from the start, the kernels just dry out and eventually burn without ever popping.

I suggest having different sizes of wood available.  Wood with a small diameter will burn up faster than a fat piece, so it is great for getting the fire started, but also for something like baking where you want less of a dip in heat when that fuel is added. On the other hand, if you're letting brisket or stew slow-cook in that oven, larger pieces of wood are called for. Sometimes you want to keep the stove lit, but not to heat the house overmuch. In that case, it helps to use wood that's cut in a short, fat chunk, so there's less fuel but it still lasts longer than a long thin piece, even though they're the same volume.

If you have a cast-iron stovetop, consider having one section you keep polished and clean for cooking on directly. Toast, tortillas, and pancakes are best cooked right on the stovetop where you have more space and more heat than in a pan. When my grown kids get together, one of their happiest shared memories is of the stovetop covered with pancakes on a winter morning!

The individual variety means a lot when it comes to cold-hardiness. For example, Dark Star zucchini, renowned for it's drought-tolerance, is also more frost-resistant than other zucchini. Still not super hardy, but 2 or 3 degrees of hardiness can make a big difference in marginal situations.

Peppers vary even more--there are 3 different varieties, originating in climates from hot tropical jungle to desert to cool mountains. Serranos ( the name means "from the hills") seem to be the most hardy of the common ones I've grown. They even have some fuzz on their leaves to prevent freezing.

The very best pepper I've found for overwintering is the Criolla Sella pepper from the Andes. https://www.quailseeds.com/store/p32/Criolla_Sella_Hot_Pepper.html  They are a small golden pepper with a fruity, habanero-type flavor but with more manageable hotness, about like a serrano. Fabulous in the kitchen, and beautiful as a house plant. They have a bushy round shape like a miniature oak tree only 3 feet tall. A single plant can bear up to a hundred peppers.

For overwintering, a larger pot is better. I like to use big tubs if I can, with several plants in them. That way if the perimeter freezes, the roots in the center stay unfrozen and alive. I usually give them some kelp meal or seaweed to promote hardiness as the weather cools in September, and mulch with leaves. Don't let them dry up, but don't overwater. Then in spring a dressing of compost or manure and a good watering gets them going again. All the usual winter protection can be used inside the greenhouse during cold snaps--fleece or bedsheets, cloches, etc. This might be a good time for the slight but even heat of a compost pile or bin of wet wood chips inside the greenhouse as well. It's worth experimenting with, anyway.