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What gardening plants/projects/techniques have high value per effort? Now that I'm married and we have our own place I actually have control over a garden rather than helping with my parents as I did growing up. I'm fairly picky about what foods I like to eat, but there's still a wide range within that, and my wife is less picky, so we have a vegetable garden with a bunch of stuff. We also recently got a variety of berry bushes we are trying to go, and I'm experimenting with growing potatoes in cloth bags. So right now we have a bunch of different plants and I don't especially know any of the details about which ones like what conditions or what makes the difference between a mediocre yield and a good yield. We put down mulch to help block weeds, and a wire fence to keep out critters, but aside from that, what are things I can do that are especially beneficial relative to their effort and cost? Also, which plants give disproportionately high value relative to their effort to grow? For context, I am in the northeast U.S. with a relatively unshaded yard, at least where the garden is, and partially clay-ish soil.
Seconding the "expensive, delicious, and/or rare" thing. There's a reason that tomatoes are a classic home gardener crop: good tomatoes are so much better than what you can find in the grocery that they are basically two different things, and getting the good stuff from a farmer's market is expensive. Berries are also a great choice, though I will warn you that you probably want to invest in some bird netting or you are likely to get most of your crop stolen (by the birds, I mean).
Some other considerations include whether you are more limited on space or time, and to what extent "fun to grow" is important. If you are space limited and just want good bang for your buck, potatoes are a terrible choice; if you are not space limited and want something easy and fun, potatoes are pretty cool; they don't require much maintenance, and digging for buried treasure at the end of the season is great fun (or at least it was when I was a kid; I've been space-limited as an adult, so...).
Like potatoes, onions, carrots, and other cheap stuff that keeps well are not great choices unless you really have fun with them. Greens (lettuce, cabbage, spinach) are really situational; how bad a problem you have with insects can make or break you. Cucurbits are pretty fun, though I'd go for summer squash / zucchini and cucumbers rather than winter squash, as the risks are higher and relative returns lower for winter squash. I liked growing green beans and snow peas, but YMMV there. Both hot and sweet peppers, if you like them, are, like tomatoes, a great choice. Tomatillos are great fun too, but you need to be a little more careful as they don't self-pollinate and need to be picked before they are ripe.
One thing that might not be obvious is how much the variety you plant can matter. Don't just get stuff off the shelf at Home Depot for most things. If you want to eat fresh green beans, get something good like Fortex instead of whatever the big box store sells. Do your research on tomato varieties and select for the things most important to you. There are a million cool hot pepper varieties that you can pretty much only get from specialty stores; you don't have to grow only jalapenos and banana peppers. In general, starting things from seed is a lot of fun and opens up a world of varieties that you'll never see if you buy starts.
As far as other things to do:
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