If we're talking low-effort, high-yield food plants:
Purple Basil - you can use it for tea, salad, a flavoring for "spirits" or as a spice. It is good for your heart, high in vitamins, and the leaves can be used to clean wounds because they are antibacterial. Negative: It will take over your yard. No matter where you plant it, it will sprout somewhere else.
Many species of elephant ear - tasty, good to wrap meat in on the grill, and many varieties have tasty roots. One Polynesian varietal is poi, and an Asian varietal is taro. Taro tastes like the best sweet potato you've ever had. We have taro and Bac Ha growing in our yard. Bac Ha doesn't have much flavor, but absorbs and enhances the flavor of what it is cooked in. Eaten by itself, raw, Bac Ha will reduce flem if you have a bronchial or sinus problem.
Daikon - it's technically a radish, but the texture and flavor is more like a cooked carrot. Really good pickled in vinegar. It is one of my favorite veggies.It also helps arthritis, is an immunobooster, helps with allergies, and combats IBS.
Russian sunflower - they do better in the South than other varieties, with the bonut that they have a really high seed yield. Assuming nothing upsets ours this year, we're looking to have between 8 and 10 pounds of seeds.
Millet - good in hearty soups and can be made into bread or beer or something like grits. The beer comes out looking and tasting suspiciously like Bud Light, regardless of whether it is made as an ale or lager, but smells like a heffeweissen. It is very dissapointing if you are expecting it to taste like it smells.
Then there are the "weeds":
Clover - edible...sort of. It is safe to eat, but purple and white clover are the only ones that don't taste like fertilizer. High in nutrients, and taste good jellied.
Collards and mustard greens grow wild in every ditch around here. I'm not a fan. I think collards taste like lawn clippings.
Poke salat - edible if you know how to cook it, in theory, but only palatable with fatback, and preferably cooked by an old lady who calls everyone "hon", "baby", or "chile" - so mostly white ladies over the age of 70, and black ladies over the age of 50.
Milk thistle - the leaves are kinda like spinach, the roots of young plants are kinda like carrots, and the flowers are like artichokes, and some people (not me) like the seeds roasted. The stems can be "milked" for medicinal purposes.
Dew berries - these grow wild mostly east of here
blackberries - these grow wild a little north of here. They used to grow here, but people mostly killed them off as briars.
deerberries - they are in the blueberry family, but sweeter and smaller. The hard part is getting to them before the squirrels and deer.
pawpaws - like deerberries, about the time theyre ripe, they have all been eaten by other animals.
mock strawberries - they are really healthy, but taste like the water real strawberries were washed in.
wild strawberries - less common than the mock. Delicious, but it takes hours to get enough of them to fill a bowl
muscadines/scupadines - they magically appear on any untended fence in Alabama. You may not even know they are there until a neighbor asks if they can get some. Often better than grapes, and make good wine if you painstakingly take the seeds out before fermentation. I've been saving a bottle of blackberry and muscadine wine for a special occasion.
