Alder Burns

One technique I used when running goats in woods was to cut about halfway through tall saplings with a machete or a hatchet, and then bend the top of the tree down so that they could reach the leaves and buds. They would browse on this, and then in following rotations through the area there would be re-growth and sprouts from the stub below the cut for them to work on.  Mostly I used this where I was wanting to thin the stand of trees anyway or be selective about which species to leave unbrowsed.  Some trees, such as most elms, are not only preferred browse but are also vigorous sprouters....

In the huge region of south and east Asia where they are native, these radishes are mostly grown for cooked or fermented use.  I remember seeing whole truckloads of them in India and Bangladesh and wondering what in the world people do with all those radishes!!  They are cooked up in curry, like everything else, and including the greens.  If they are grown with any stress, or in the wrong season, they won't produce much root; but they will still produce greens, and in fact they will produce those greens in less time from seed than just about anything else.  Cooked up, radish greens are comparable with, and interchangeable with, turnip or mustard greens.  I would just plant them whenever and wherever and find out how they grow by trial and error, eating greens the whole time.  I like the greens better than the roots anyway, and often grow them in dense patches and cut the greens off and let them grow back for multiple harvests...

I wonder if you might have luck with baited electric fence.  I have used this successfully on multiple sites to keep problem animals of all sizes in and out of areas.  You just need a single wire and either plastic/fiberglass stakes or insulators tacked to posts, trees, etc.  Hang the wire just at nose height of the animal in question and then attach little tags to it every few feet....the larger the animal and the better nose it has the further apart they can be....8 to 10 feet works for deer and goats.  Then spread a swatch of something yummy on the tags, facing outward.  Peanut butter is sort of the default, most animals love it.  The animals smell it and give the tag a lick and get a REALLY good shock!!  They won't be back for months, and will tell all their friends to stay away.  I've used this to keep deer out and goats in, with a single wire for both.  One challenge for you will be grounding the fence in the dry....you might need to set this up during a wet spell so the shock will be strong, and then hopefully they will remember it the rest of the time!

I've only eaten them once or twice, big fat silver maple seeds.  I think I baked them a while in the solar cooker. They fell in such abundance from this one tree that I was wondering to myself how to preserve them, or gather them in bulk for chickens.  Perhaps simply smashing them and drying in the sun, and let the chickens peck out the seed meats?  I've done this with things like excess pecans, and acorns too, after leaching the mash.

Before going to the time, effort, and expense of making a dedicated solar dehydrator, try the following three niches, present at many sites, and see if they might be adequate to your purpose.
1. A vehicle parked in the sun.  Windows cracked or not depending on weather, night/day etc.
2. An unused greenhouse or similar space, such as during the summer.
3. The attic space of a house.  All of these niches can be improved by setting up a fan to circulate air over and around the trays, screens, or tied bundles of food or herbs.
  Discovering the hot attic was a huge breakthrough for me this past summer.  I was able to get batch after batch of sliced tomatoes dried right down to brittle within three or four days....

Especially on a new site where gardens are still in startup mode, I subsidize my diet with dumpster diving.  A literally astonishing amount of perfectly usable food (not to mention just about everything else imaginable) is thrown out on the daily!  It also makes a wonderful subsidy to animal feed, especially omnivores like poultry and pigs!  A few other tidbits in my daily life include....making my own tool handles, usually from cured sticks cut in advance and put away somewhere to season.  making my own sandals.  Growing facial hair and cutting my own hair....saving on barbers and shaving.  Dumpster diving clothes---who cares what farm grubbies look like!  

I have grown coffee chicory for some years now.  There are improved varieties available that make big smooth roots superior to wild chicory.  In most climates it grows like a biennial....making a big clump of dandelion like leaves the first summer, and then shooting up to bloom and make seeds the next.  Often some sprouts show up around the first plants and keep going that way so it acts like a perennial.  The tradition seems to be that the best roots are the ones going into the first winter, before they bloom.  Once they start blooming, or afterwards, the quality diminishes.  But I'm not sure how it would behave in a warm climate like yours.  If you're not irrigating through the dry summer they might even reverse the growing season and grow through the winter and die down in the heat?  But the main point is that they are at their best before they bloom...

many useful and medicinal herbs are actually vigorous meadow plants and fully able to compete with things like grass and goldenrod when they are established.  The challenge is getting them established.  Try to start with large pots, or divisions from well established plants....and get out there and plant them as early as you can so they have a chance to settle in while the weather is still cool and moist.  Thinking things like yarrow, tansy, motherwort, mugwort, monardas, elecampane, evening primrose, agastache, lemon balm, self heal, milkweeds, althaea, echinacea, fennel, for instance, and also Jerusalem artichoke which you plant from a tuber (provided that is that you actually like to eat them!)  Many of these plants can become weedy in their own right so they are best in a semi-wild situation like this rather than being expected to stay in their lanes in an orderly and manicured garden.  Enjoy the journey of discovery!

Don't forget to always place the outhouse somewhere near or just beyond the wood shed.  That way you can grab some wood on your way back to the house

When I lived in Georgia in peach country, I found the worms (plum curculio I think) pretty much ruined them most years.  That is, until I started running chickens under the trees!  It was a pretty big flock, 50 layers or more, in a small orchard of maybe 1/4 acre....so enough that they kept the ground scratched bare and I had to lock them out to grow a cover crop etc.  But they ate every fruit that hit the ground, including it's content of insects, and so interrupted the life cycle year after year.  Eventually I could get 75% worm free fruit on early varieties, organically.  Even the extension people that came out to see were impressed....this was in the '90's....I think now more people use Surround and maybe some other sprays that work pretty good?