Antonia Barry

I forage cattails, acorns, hickory nuts, black walnuts, lambsquarters, blackberries, sumac berries, autumn olive, sunchokes, asparagus, and some others. Sunchokes can be found in the ditches around here (Northern Ohio) and I didn't see them mentioned yet.

http://www.cheapvegetablegardener.com/cheap-led-light-and-grow-box/
Here is a link to an inexpensive grow light set up using Christmas lights. This is the season for after-christmas sales, so I thought this might be of use. You could set your starts in this at night, so you don't miss any natural sunlight.

Also, I second the microgreens suggestion. They are mostly sprouts that have been allowed to green up some, and so take less sunlight than full grown plants. I've used lentils from the grocery store to make sprouts, too.

When I was vegan, I made gluten to use as a meat replacer. I used the starch water to thicken soups and stews, and I froze some in one or two cup containers for later use. The broth that I cooked the gluten in was always thickened up with some of the starch water, more veggies added, beans, and some small chunks of the gluten for that day's dinner. Sometimes I would add the starch water to powdered soy milk with some maple syrup, and cook it to make a vegan pudding that my family really loved.  When my kids were toddlers, I would add food coloring to the starch water, cook it until a little thick, and let them use it as finger paint. The paintings were composted when they started to flake. I also experimented with using it to make play-dough, but never came up with a satisfactory recipe.

I was just reading "The self sufficient life and how to live it" by John Seymour, and he mentions Tagetes minuta will kill bindweed. I found this blog post:
https://wellywoman.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/the-weed-killing-plant/
My rabbits and chickens won't eat bindweed, and my neighbors would be unhappy if I let it go unchecked, so this might be helpful.

"Cornish Cross Chickens are Not the Answer"

That depends on the question, I guess.
If you are a someone who is striving to limit the inputs from outside your own farm, I agree that Cornish Crosses would not be the answer. I think Buckeyes would fill that bill pretty well.

However, if you are looking to raise your own healthy meat and get a good bang for your buck, then I think Cornish Crosses are one of the best answers. You don't have to feed them the crap you get at tractor supply to grow them, and if you start them out foraging, they are really good at it, though the bigger they get the less good they are at chasing grasshoppers. But if a bug or tasty clover leaf is close to them, they are on it. They even stay up later and get up earlier so they forage longer each day than the other chickens.

If I get a bunch of chicks in March, and another in July, I have enough chicken to eat tucked into the freezer for the year and don't have to mess with them in the winter.

I feed my Cornish crosses the same thing as my layers. The main portion is what the local feed mill calls 'scratch grains'- a mix of whole grain hard and soft wheat, oats, sorghum, millet and milo, and cracked corn. It has 12% protein. I like that, other than the corn, the grains are whole.
I add a rice pot full of cooked lentils mixed with seaweed powder each day, along with scraps and garden waste and what they forage, and the chickens do well, both my layers and my meat chickens. However, I don't put the chicken's food in a feeder. If the weather is nice, it all gets kind of tossed all over the yard. If the weather is bad, the layers get fed in a bowl in their house, and the meat chickens get fed in smaller increments in their house.

For meat, I've eaten buckeyes and jersey giants as well as the roosters from my laying chick orders. So far the cornish cross have been the best tasting and largest, as large as the jersey giants were at 11 months.
I would agree about the lack of individual personalities. I find them all to be nice and friendly, with not one (so far) being mean or bossy. They like to come over and get a pat and pet when I am sitting in the yard and often, if I am sitting in the grass, one will come over to sit on my leg. And when they run they make me laugh every time, which I find to be an endearing quality. They do poop a lot. If you are able to save and compost it, that can be a good thing if you have a large garden.
The only other drawback I see with them is that they are not as fastidious about their hygiene as the layers. They have no problem walking around with skidmarks that would make a layer blush, and spend almost no time preening. For that reason I house them separately at night, so that I can clean their quarters much more often. Other than that, they spend the day with the layers.

I did some sheet mulching and planting without soil this year, since I just moved to a new place and the soil is rock hard clay and silt.
I thought my garden wouldn't grow much, but it seems to be doing OK. Not gangbusters, but OK.
I made raised beds and filled them with a mix of about 2/3 leaf mulch (from last year's leaf piles, both mine and all I could filch from my neighbors) and rotten straw I was given, and 1/3 aged horse poop. I had thought just to layer things, but I only had the two layers, so I mixed them up. I had put down torn open paper bags as a weed barrier under the mulch and poop, rather than cardboard, since that is what I had. Then the leaf mulch/rotten straw, then the horse manure. I lightly mixed up the leaf/straw with the horse manure, and let it sit for a week before planting in it. Oh, and I mixed in a bunch of wood ashes too, since I thought the leaf mulch might be a little acidic. I sprinkled it on fairly generously before mixing it all up.

Everything was slow to start, but I now have peas, mizuna, spinach, strawberries, and, surprisingly, carrots all doing pretty well. Radishes were great, and the biggest success is the onions. Usually my onions never get very big, but the ones that I just tucked into the poopy mulch a month or so ago are now hanging out mostly above the surface and are really big. By the time they are ready to harvest they will be big like grocery store onions, which will be a first for me.

The added organic matter (poop, straw, leaves, ashes) had started out being about 6 or 7 inches thick when I first put it in the beds, but now it is a lot less thick than that. But the soil underneath is not so rock hard, so I'm hopeful that after a year or two the garden beds will be really nice.

Would this work for you?

IMG_0004 by antfiresbetter, on Flickr

I am building a cob chicken house. I had hoped to get it finished before winter, but it is very slow going. But next winter the girls will be comfortable, and in the summer they should be cool too.
I really do wish it was finished, this is the coldest and snowiest winter here in ages, according to the neighbors. I've thought about just roofing the 3 foot tall walls if the weather breaks for a weekend, but so far no break.