Jamie Chevalier

I've had some experience transplanting blueberries and their cousins, rhododendrons. There are a few key concepts that set you up for success.

As with most plants, transplanting during dormancy is best. (Bear in mind that for broadleaf evergreens, the dormant season may be opposite than for deciduous plants.) Suckers are almost always easier to transplant, both because there is a smaller top growth for the roots to support and because young "teenage" plants are growing faster and have more vigor than more sedate mature plants.

As with most plants, to reduce stress and shock for the plant, you need to do two things: maintain the plant's hydration and maintain top/root balance so that hydraulic lift can get sap to the whole plant.  Maintain hydration and reduce stress by transplanting at a cool, low-light, windless time. You may also want to wrap the plant in damp cloth and/or dip the roots in muddy water before replanting. Do NOT water heavily before transplanting--the extra-heavy wet soil will tear away small roots that might have remained intact if they were supporting a lighter root ball.  
Maintain top/bottom balance by serious pruning. Most berry bushes will have several canes (trunks) sprouting from the crown. If yours does, then cut 1/3 to 1/2 of them to the ground. If there is just one trunk, then cut out 1/3 of the branches. Once a particular trunk or branch is more than about 3 years old, there is no point trimming it:  either cut it to the ground or leave it alone, as old wood will not sprout twigs and fruiting spurs easily. The vitality of the plant is in the crown, not the branches. Cutting a branch to the ground stimulates the crown to make new ones. It is a coppicing process.

Tips unique to the Heath Family (rhodies, blueberries, azaleas, cranberries, lingonberries, arbutus, etc)
These plants put down a few long anchor roots and then many small hairlike roots very near the surface. This can make them easy to transplant IF you know what's important. What is important in this case is breadth, not depth. Use a sharp tool to cut around in a wide circle well outside the dripline of the plant. Have a bedsheet on hand to slide underneath the bush. Go straight down about 6 inches, then gently start digging underneath the plant and prying up the root mat. You should be able to recognize the roots of your berry bush fairly soon by where they are coming from, color, number of roots, etc. Keep gently lifting and sliding the sheet in to support the roots and soil as you cut them free. If the root mat is dense (rhododendrons), you can roll it up like a carpet, but blueberries seldom are that much of a mat, and require more support for the root mat. When it is free of the ground, slide the sheet completely under it and carry it in state to it's new home. Be sure that the soil surface is neither buried nor sitting high in it's new home--the roots need to be close to the surface but the cut edges of the mat should not be exposed. Water well. A light sprinkle of compost is usually a help. If the weather is warm or windy, give your plant protection with shadecloth, a sheet, or a cardboard shelter.

Using this method, I have transplanted rhododendrons in full bloom with no problem, but that was in a very cool climate with a lot of cloud cover.

Cat litter is a quick and readily available alternative, especially if you're away from home and can't follow your normal procedure.

Anything you use will reach ambient humidity and stop absorbing any more. The great difference with silica gel is that the kind with dye in it will tell you when that happens. With rice, etc, you have to keep renewing it on a schedule since you can't tell.

An old seedsman told me he puts a sheet of paper in there when closing the container. If the paper crackles when crumpled a bit, the air is still pretty dry. If it has started to merely rustle, you're behind on renewing the absorbant stuff. If it is limp, you really need to dry things out pronto!

It's interesting to hear the different perspectives as people's lives change. I was a fisher/homesteader for many years, and subsistence foraging/hunting/gardening/fishing/canning was a big part of my life. Raising a family in a cabin with only boat or float-plane access, providing, preserving, and preparing food was a major focus of my time.
Now I'm a small-business owner in my 70's, with disabled family members, a very small income, and long drives to get to resources, stores, or activities.  

Living in the wilderness gave me an appreciation of fresh wild or homegrown food, yes. But also for the amount of time and mental focus involved.  Living with wild creatures all around gave me an appreciation for their pragmatism. And dealing with life-threatening disabilities gave me a different set of priorities.
Right now, I don't have the privilege of using that much energy--either from my own muscles, from my car's gas tank, or stored in the form of money--to locate food. Nor do I have the time and mental energy to put into locating it, maintaining networks for it, and so on. The concept of "mental work" is useful here. Could I fit in a few more subsistence activities into my schedule? Yes. Do I have the bandwidth to plan them? No--I'd rather have lunch with a friend, read a book, take a swim, or sit by the fire and recharge than plan one more "have-to" activity.
Mental and emotional sustainability should be our goal as well as physical sustainability.

Many of the respondents here are making subsistence activities--either growing their food or sourcing it--a satisfying part of their social and emotional life. That's ideal, but not attainable for all, just like any other form of excellence. If it's feeling like drudgery, then it would be better to ease up, make a few changes now rather than getting so burnt-out that your abandon the project entirely. Hearing how people are living the dream is great for inspiration, but in my experience, it's overwhelming for those who are drowning in detail already.

I have a couple of suggestions in that direction, and I hope other folks will have more ways to cut back, let go, and streamline life until energy and inspiration return.
1) Find a few things you like and can get/grow easily and concentrate on them. Carol Deppe's book The Resilient Gardener is helpful. She talks about how to find those few staples that make abundance easy rather than trying to grow or source everything in the store. She also gives a lot of attention to strategies for coping with setbacks and limits--financial, physical, medical, and so on. Most subsistence cultures and historical communities based their diet on a couple of staples, like beans and corn, bread and meat, potatoes and cheese, or fish and rice, and then used small amounts of many different seasonal embellishments like wild greens and fruits as they were easily available.
2) Cook large batches; eat leftovers
3) Just as I get wood chips and fallen leaves from the less-sustainable yards of my neighbors, and just as people use readily-available fossil fuels to build earthworks for future abundance, you can use the commodity food system as a source of cheap food energy when needed. Get a big bag of beans, a bag of flour or rice, some discount canned goods, or whatever gives you the cushion you need for food security you don't need to think about. And do have some indulgences stashed as well, for those nights when you need a lift.
4) Recognize that there's no perfect, only better. One week, better might be all local food. Another week, though, better might be more social connections, more artistic endeavors, or more sleep. It's not a contest, and food is not the only arena.
5) If you're going to add anything at all, maybe something in the mindfulness/creative/ gratitude/recreational line might round out your routine better than another task. Or maybe just a good laugh.

Many good points have been made here, which I don't need to repeat. I would just add a couple of things:

It's easy to overlook small things that can lead to major expenses. Parts for critical machinery may not only save the cost of more expensive parts in the future, it may keep your infrastructure functioning once parts are no longer available. We've had to replace "obsolete" equipment with an expensive and shoddy new stuff for lack of a simple and cheap part.
If you have to provide your own water from a well or watercourse, I'd prioritize parts and quality equipment for that. Fastenings and cordage are other basics that are becoming harder and harder to find, replace, or afford, but are critical. Large containers, both for cooking and for storage are essential. You won't save any money doing "small batch" canning, however trendy it might be. The energy you use costs more than the food you get, unless you do large batches.

My pressure canner has fed us for 45 years, through good and bad times, and I also use it as a boiling-water-bath canner for fruit. It is especially useful for fish, which often are available either not at all or in great quantity. It's a good idea to be prepared for those times of quantity, of any resource. That's why every homestead should have a 50lb bag of salt.

Salting is a vastly underused and underrated way to preserve a surplus, especially when that surplus is large and it would be too time-consuming to can, cut up for drying, fit in the freezer, etc. All you need to preserve a food from spoilage is water, salt, a 5 gallon bucket, and a clean rock to weight food down in the brine. If you suddenly have to deal with a truly huge surplus, you can scale up to an 55-gallon drum with no change in procedure. A strong brine will assure preservation, a milder one enable fermentation, which is well worth learning, but not essential at first.

Homestead and survival books often talk about salting your own cabbage, livestock or fish, but it's equally useful for some items on sale at the store. Butter is an expensive thing that is subject to steep inflation, is compact, and goes on sale at deep discount a few times a year. I learned to do what the old fishermen used to do before they left the dock for a season in the Bering Sea--salt down a bucket of butter. It is incredibly easy, and I have reached into the brine and brought out perfect-tasting cubes when I returned to the homestead after a year's absence. The brine doesn't change the flavor, because while it keeps out spoilage organisms, it can't penetrate into the butter--the fat content is too high.

It's easy to  brine butter:
Bring a big pot of water to a boil and stir in salt until you can't get any more to dissolve. Then let it cool while you prepare the butter bucket. Take off the paper wrapping from each cube, and arrange the butter in a clean empty bucket. This can of course be scaled up to a 50-gallon drum for large amounts of butter, fish, green beans, or whatever.) You can pack them closely in a circular pattern and put in several layers. Then go find a plate and a weight. You need a non-metallic plate that goes inside the bucket with about a half inch of clearance all around. Cheap thrift store china is perfect for this. Put it on top of your butter and weight it down with a clean rock, a jar of water, or any clean, heavy, non-metallic item. Then, add the cold brine. (Never add brine before weighing down the butter, as it will float up in a jumble and you'll have to arrange it all again.) Put on a cover to keep out dirt, and you're done.

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.