Reddit mentions of How to Grow Perennial Vegetables: Low-maintenance, Low-impact Vegetable Gardening

Certainly the links below are great (particularly Gaia's garden). There are a couple other low-cost intro books that might be useful (wait till you're hooked to drop 200 bucks on Dave Jacke's "Edible Forest Gardens" -- though it's amazing.)


Eric Toensmeier's "Paradise Lot"
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/paradise_lot:paperback

Great book that reads like a novel, so it can be easier to get through than other textbook-style books listed in this reddit. They live outside of Boston, if I'm remembering right, so pretty freaking cold, but they're succeeding well.


Martin Crawford's "How to Grow Perennial Vegetables"
http://www.amazon.com/How-Grow-Perennial-Vegetables-Low-maintenance/dp/1900322846/ref=pd_sim_b_5

Easier to read than his forest-gardening book (which has lots of high-level systems thinking, but can be overwhelming). He specifically references a ton of perennial vegetables, many of which aren't covered in other texts, and gives methods for their cultivation within a permaculture setup.

Personally, I find it easier to get a handle on the whole systems-design thing through videos, so here are some of my favorite youtube-available vids on urban permacuture:


Urban Permaculture with Geoff Lawton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeIZwenDSvo

This site is in Austrailia, and has a climate more like central or southern california, but in principal, the stacking of functions can be applied to a northeastern site.


Permaculture Trio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXVnAMQRGbI

These 3 stories from the UK cover a range of scales of permaculture implementations, the last one is a very compact urban site with a climate very similar to the northeast.


Backyard Permaculture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18ZuuAOUIXo

This was produced for Gardening Australia, so not all of the species of plants used are available locally, but the climate seems to be a pretty close match to a east-coast state's. TONS of great ideas, though with a larger lot and budget than most people have.


Finally, even if you decide on the structure of plantings that you have room for, it can be a beast to decide on the right plants for your area, or locate the seed stock. This answer could be an entire post on its own, but a good place to start is Practical Plants:
http://practicalplants.org/wiki/Practical_Plants

This wiki contains the entire database of Plants for A Future (pfaf.org) in addition to more that has been user-added since it went live last year. It's pretty, easy to navigate, and FULL of good plant suggestions which can be filtered in a variety of ways.


So, now that you've got all this info, go to town!

One last note on the grow-lights. Personally, I don't think that any real permaculturist would frown on grow-lights -- particularly the low-wattage LED varieties available now. The real goal is, as Factran pointed out, resiliency, and relying on a grid connection for indoor light is less resilient than growing in your yard. But, maybe you have PV that gives you plenty of power in the winter, and you want to grow greened sprouts indoors for juicing. Or something else even crazier. I say go for it -- more ideas = better. Just be sure to share your successes and failures with us when you do!

But definitely try growing some stuff outdoors, even if it's in a windowbox. You'd be surprised -- seeds just want to grow.