Alder Burns

My latest learning curve in this area is re-using cooking water.  Both our rainwater and our city water have issues, so we have a rather expensive water filter, such that the filtered, drinking grade water it produces is rather precious.  Since I use it also to cook with, I'm learning what I can re-use the cooking water for.  Water used for veggies, greens, or meats gets saved for making curry and dal with (I eat a lot of curry and dal).  Water from cooking potatoes or pasta can get re-used to cook more potatoes or pasta at least once more, or else to cook rice, or else it goes in the curry/dal use as well. Sweet water from things like squash and sweet potatoes is a bit of a challenge....it can go to the other uses provided it's not too sweet...as in be mixed with some of the other "stocks"....if I ever get back into wine-making on a frequent basis that might be a good use for it!

When I lived in California (in the central valley, which has been called an "extreme Mediterranean climate", I eventually had most of my annual veggies in raised beds edged with old roofing tin or cement blocks.  I was running drip irrigation on most things anyway, whether in the ground or in the beds, and so it didn't seem to matter much, the drip was going every day no matter where.  Mostly I used the beds to exclude the rapacious gophers....I had screen mesh in the bottoms of the beds to keep them out....otherwise they would eat every single root crop I would try to grow, even onions and garlic, and sometimes damage other things too.  Also some of the beds ended up with plastic in the bottom as well, to exclude the intrusive roots of some nearby pine trees which seriously colonized the beds after that irrigation water.  One or more beds would be completely dug out every year and re-filled....this provided the opportunity to place things like humanure compost, accumulated paper products, and the raked piles of half-composted mulch around the yard (gathered for fire suppression efforts) or from the animal pens (we had chickens and sheep and sometimes geese and goats).  So the raised beds were a win for me, because of three things...gopher exclusion, root exclusion, and organic matter incorporation; all of which only peripherally, if at all, have to do with moisture.

I found that among the brassicas, mustard seems to be their favorite.  If there is mustard around, they crowd onto it and mostly avoid the others.  I found that by leaving some mustard to go to seed, it keeps most of the bugs on itself, almost until it starts to dry down, and they leave other things like broccoli and collards alone enough to go on producing.  When the mustard finally does dry down, then they will move en masse and overwhelm the other things too, but I get several more weeks out of them this way.  Perhaps if I carefully gathered up all the mustard and it's infestation at exactly the right moment I might get some more control that way....idea to save!

The woodland that you "reclaimed" was doing the best suppression of bermudagrass you could have hoped for.  I dealt with this when I lived in Georgia for ten years.  Nothing I did or planted suppressed it for long.  Not repeated tillage.  Not penning chickens or pigs on it for months.  Not cooking it all summer under clear plastic.  And not growing other crops, although planting them after thorough tillage often enabled those crops to grow just for that season.  Since I was on principle against a lot of tillage, I ended up relying on cardboard and paper mulch, either around plants or planting plants through it.  This enabled me to grow a lot of stuff, but I had to apply the cardboard every year, except in small raised beds where the grass could be controlled by hand.  But I learned not to have any kind of permanent edging on the beds...the grass rhizomes get up next to or under this and then it's impossible to get rid of.  The whole area of mounded beds benefits from going under cardboard from time to time.
     That said, I eventually observed something....why doesn't it grow in the woods?  Or even up under thickets of privet and blackberries and whatever else grows when you leave a patch alone for a few years?  Bermudagrass (and it's partner in crime, nutsedge) is generally intolerant of shade.   Just as I was getting ready to leave that farm, I was developing an idea similar to swidden or shifting cultivation....going in a clearing a garden area out of "bush"....head high or taller weeds and brush....and then planting in that for a few years till the weeds found their way to it, and then moving to a new spot.  Fortunately in that situation there was more than enough land, and I had access to a heavy bush hog mower at need.   This tells me that maybe your cover crop idea could work, but it will take multiple years....let the cover crops reach full height, then mow and till and plant immediately with the next one.  You could mix clover with the rye and something like soybean or cowpea with the sorghum for some nitrogen fixation and even more shade.  I think the shading action is what you want....the challenge times will be when you switch from the winter to the summer cover and vice versa.  A thorough tillage might give your seeds the jump over the sprouts coming from the buried bermuda rhizomes.  
   Or you could do like I did before I realized it won't grow in shade....just plan to import and use a large amount of cardboard and paper every year.

If you've got enough to make it worthwhile, pineapple makes pretty good wine

Coffee grounds are a unique resource, partly because they are semi-sterile as a result of making the coffee with steam or boiling water.  Thus when fresh they make a good substrate for growing certain mushrooms.  Other than that they are also an excellent food for black soldier flies....I've often gotten bunches of them from coffee shops and then sun-dried them for later use for this purpose.  Both of these ideas are more valuable when they are available in bulk, such as if you are near enough to a town with coffee shops.

I am sold on BSF, and will bin them and use them deliberately when I get chickens again.  As it is they show up in my compost pile every summer.  They will eat the vilest imaginable stuff, stuff that the chickens won't touch directly (which is saying a lot!) Chicken manure, fresh humanure, cat manure, poisonous mushrooms from the forest, ripe roadkill, old moldy stuff of any sort....all in the bin, all converted into feed!  Coffee grounds are such a favorite I would ask about them at coffee shops in town, and carefully spread them out to dry for long term use.
  The biggest problem is getting enough feedstock to make their yields a significant part of the diet of even five layers.  An average bin will supply most of their protein through the late summer and early fall, perhaps with some surplus dormant grubs to feed off for a while more.  I would really need to up my feed-scrounging game with more dumpster diving, maybe drying my humanure in the sun somehow? so as to bulk them up and grow a lot in the comparatively short season and then store the grubs through the rest of the year.  I think they would stay dormant through the cold in the cellar where we keep our potatoes.
   And pro tip, you don't need one of those expensive "bipod" bins.  Any bucket, barrel or tub will do, provided it's tipped at just the right angle so the mature grubs will crawl up the lowest incline and drop off the edge into a container.  I've used 55 gallon barrels and five gallon buckets.  You can get a lot bigger colony in a barrel, too.

In addition to a vehicle or greenhouse space, the other  very common suitable niche available to many people is the attic space of a house.  This is often both hot and dry, and simply setting up some screens and maybe a fan for air movement is all you need.  I have multiple years now used this niche to dry sliced tomatoes almost snap dry for long term storage, in the humid Midwest.

I would think there are better uses for waste honey than for the soil, unless it's completely fermented out and rotten.  For instance, you could ferment it into mead.  If you're still scared of microbial contamination at that point, you could then distill the mead into moonshine with a small stovetop still.  I've used this to convert large amounts of sweet stuff, mostly from dumpsters, but also including some bitter privet honey; into perfectly usable alcohol.....much of which was used for herbal tinctures.

The other critical thing to remember about this is that rural sites dependent on wells for water....the well pump won't run without power!  In California at least, the power company would preemptively shut the power off in any high wind event, since the likelihood of a fire start due to the power lines etc. and wind is a proven deadly likelihood....this was responsible for the disastrous Camp Fire which ate the town of Paradise.  So a generator or other backup system capable of running the well pump is practically essential in many such situations, especially if that water is being relied on for fire suppression practices.