Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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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.
Wish I could give you more concrete advice, but I'm on the opposite side of the country, on sandy soil, and in a much milder winter climate.
For me all the brassicas are a staple all year round. You can't beat good broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, etc. (collard in winter).
It never goes below 10F here, so it's all easy to keep alive with only the most sensitive stuff in a cold frame. I've had spinach come back up from under 2' of snow, but if there's a killer frost before the snow it'll kill anything outside a frame. New england winters sound much harsher, so your window is probably limited there.
Green beans are essential in summer. Squash is fun just to watch it spread. Tomatoes... Eh, they never seem worth the effort for how little I actually eat them, although seeding a few golden cherry types near the house makes a wonderful snack.
Garlic is one of the better things you can grow almost anywhere. Just make sure to get a good hardneck that bulbs on your long summer days. Mine just came out and is hanging in the shed, wonderful crop this year.
Potatoes are fun and easy. I actually just stick them in a trench on a bed and hill them up. This year I grew a few hundred pound in a compost trench that's going to take a screening hedge this fall. Lots of stuff loves growing directly on a compost pile.
I'm very against mulching tbh. In spring it leaves your undersoil cold and harbors insects. In summer it soaks up any rain and water and evaporates it off without it getting into the soil. Here people use either bare dirt or black plastic mulch, which is absolutely great.
Somebody convinced me to try a woodchip-heavy mulch in one area this year, and I have a pic somewhere of a chard plant totally skeletonized by woodlice.
Speaking of cold frames, they're the most time and cost-effective way to do any cold weather gardening. Even in the summer they're great for starting your winter veg under insect mesh. Mine are full of the final batch of tray-seeded brassicas to go in before the final direct-seeding of spinach.
Imo the real value in a garden is always having something you can just go get for dinner. A lot of people grow way too much in summer and get bored of picking and pickling it or whatever. Cottagecore women especially tire of it quickly.
Better to have a bunch of fast cabbage in the spring and winter than a giant crop of useless football-sized sauerkraut stuff in August.
Oh, and fuck raised beds, especially the silly wooden ones. Zero point, active detriment, God knows why people do it.
One last thing: it sounds like you've already picked a spot, but I found out too late that sun isn't the only important factor in location. I have a tiny 12x12' secondary garden uphill now, which gets much less light in summer due to east+west tree shading, but stays 5-10F warmer than my valley garden during winter (and gets almost as much light due to sunrise/set being further south).
It's great for keeping broccoli going in the heat of summer too.
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Thirding the expensive/delicious/rare criteria.
I really enjoy eating berries off the bush, so if it's something you enjoy, plant some blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, hardy kiwis, blueberries (I think blackcurrants are illegal in the US). They don't require much care beyond pruning and maybe covering them for the winter. And protecting them from the goddamn birds.
If you're somewhere like Vermont or NH, then it's a bit cold for growing real damn good tomatoes, but you can still try.
We got some pretty good tomatoes last year, but the whole garden seems to be floundering this year (except cucumbers which are doing great) and I'm not sure why. It's in the exact same spot with approximately the same weather, though maybe we haven't paid as much attention to watering it on hot days as last year.
I've never heard that about black currants. I just googled it, and it looks like it used to be illegal but they lifted the ban in the early 2000s since better anti-fungal stuff has come out and they're less of a threat to trees now. But they're still really rare due to having been banned for so long. I didn't even know black currants existed until I started looking to buy berry bushes last year.
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Fedco seeds is based in Maine and they sell some varieties that are adapted to growing in cooler weather (still not frost-tolerant, of course). I think Cosmonaut Volkov is a pretty decent variety.
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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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My stance is that you should grow things that are expensive, delicious, and/or rare. You shouldn't grow things that are cheap and abundant unless you're trying to be self-sufficient. So don't grow onions and potatoes, do grow soft fruits, fresh herbs, and/or varieties that can't be bought. Throw in some cut flowers too if you like. For pure disproportionately high value to effort it has to be perennial herbs or a mature nut tree. Whatever you choose try to choose your varieties so that they cover early, mid and late season instead of having a glut that lasts two weeks and then nothing for a year.
It's a lot of work up front, and potentially not feasible if you don't have a blank canvas, but I think one of the best investments you can make is to really thoroughly prepare the ground. Ideally you want it to be nice soft fertile material that you can easily dig down to at least 6". It makes everything afterwards much easier and more productive. I suppose the short cut there is getting a pig to dig the ground over while it fertilises it for you. Likewise chickens make for near autonomous organic slug control.
I'd guess that the single highest value per effort is probably in choosing the right plants. If you can find plants that thrive in your garden you'll get a much better result for less effort than any amount of techno-fixes being spent on the wrong plant.
How do I figure that out? Do I try to google a database for what plants grow optimally in my region? Or do I have to trial and error if soil quality and sunlight amounts vary enough such that my yard is somewhat unique?
Bottom line is it's always trial and error to a degree, but you'd be foolish not to do the basic book research first. There'll be a database somewhere with climate zones and the corresponding plants/crops/varieties because it's such a perennial concern. If you wanted a better answer than I can give you maybe try looking for a local horti/agricultural college with a friendly librarian. Printed seed catalogues from local vendors are good too and probably a more user friendly format than an online catalogue as they offer more discoverability than a janky proprietary search engine, plus you know they'll be available to buy instead of reading up in a book or blog that you found via Google about what sounds like a perfect plant and then finding that the only people who sell seeds are on a different continent and want $30 for postage of a $2 pack of seeds.
If you wanted to do things The Proper Way you'd start by doing a survey of your plot for soil composition, temps, rainfall, sun/shade aspects etc before even planning what to plant but that might not be practical if you're working around an existing set of planting - it's not worth ripping out a mature ornamental tree just to vacate the best spot for heirloom cabbages. USDA zones are the baseline, you can probably find a map that will show you your average last frost date too.
In common sense terms though it's more like don't get carried away and decide that mangoes, avocadoes and vanilla pods are delicious and expensive so they'd make good home growers. You potentially could techno-fix them so that they would grow (heated glasshouse, supplemental lights, irrigation, frost protection, humming bird mimicry hand pollination, etc) but it will always be more trouble than it's worth. At the other end of the scale for instance where I live blackberries grow like a weed, so although I could grow them very easily I can just as easily gather them from any number of field hedges should I choose to while at home I cultivate tayberries (a raspberry x blackberry hybrid) that I've never seen for sale in a shop. All I do is prune it once a year and it grows so well that the only care it needs is tying up to train and support it.
I don't actually have a lot of experience growing for the table/pantry, I mostly grow ornamentals on a casual sink-or-swim basis, I just get a bit vexed when I see people getting into grow-your-own and they spend their time and resources growing basic staples in a plot too small to ever achieve a fraction of self sufficiency. I like carrots as much as the next man but I can buy a whole bag of them for 50p any day of the year. I like strawberries too, but even at soft fruit farms I've never seen alpine strawberries for sale. They're too small to be remotely economical commercially, but they're so good that they're worth growing at home alongside or even instead of a higher yielding variety.
The berry farms that visit my local farmers market had these, and Loganberries, which are similar, for a few weeks. This week they were back to black/blue/rasp/straw. Although I have also seen black cap raspberries, which are slightly more exotic.
I highly recommend thimbleberries. They are much too delicate to ever be commercially viable, and they are incredibly delicious.
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Yes, USDA zones are a good start.
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