Best veggie seeds for lazy gardeners?

I always plant a garden but I have to admit I'm a very lazy gardener!  I am much more fond of things like foraging where nature does most of the work, or permaculture gardening where it takes care of itself once I put in the initial effort.  

That said, I do love having a garden every year.  I've found that some plants grow and thrive even though I am not responsible about things like weeding, thinning and watering, and I never fertilize.  Some of the plants I've had the best success with from seed this way are rainbow swiss chard (we get months of it all the way to hard freeze, just cut and come again), nasturtiums, radishes, peas and parsley.  Other plants I know myself well enough to know I need to just buy seedlings, like tomatoes.  Even when I successfully start them inside and have happy little plants a month later, somehow I always manage to lose them before they're big and tough enough to survive.

So what are your favorite lazy garden seeds to plant?  Any tips to help them survive if they're direct seeded, other than to make sure to keep them watered the first couple of weeks?

In the past, I have been picky about plating seeds like the seed packet says.

There have also been times when I just opened the seed packet and then poured the whole packet where I was to plant then dust with some seed starter mix.

This worked well for me.

I always recommend lettuce seeds as they are easy.  Others are parsley and beans.

Perrenial vegetables are an easy lazy gardener approach.

I get lots of volunteer tomatoes in my northern MN garden just by not cleaning the garden well in the autumn. They're often more productive than the ones I plant come spring, whether direct sown, started indoors, or bought in from a nursery. Potatoes and corn and beans all just grow for me. Beets and chard are explosive, but if the rabbits and deer are bad that year, I don't get much for me. Lettuce, mustard, and basil are easy. Potato onions and garlic grow well and the ones you miss harvesting grow the next year. I'm still learning how to work with a lot of the other normal crops.

For lazy gardeners, the easiest and most forgiving from your list are:

Research Cowpea Seeds

Bengal Gram Seeds

Research Cluster Bean Seeds

Onion Seeds

Hybrid Okra Seeds

These need minimal care, tolerate drought fairly well, and are hardy growers.

Alicia Bayer wrote:I always plant a garden but I have to admit I'm a very lazy gardener!  I am much more fond of things like foraging where nature does most of the work, or permaculture gardening where it takes care of itself once I put in the initial effort.  

Oh me too! this is (one reason) why I love permaculture - lazy gardening! :D

That said, I do love having a garden every year.  I've found that some plants grow and thrive even though I am not responsible about things like weeding, thinning and watering, and I never fertilize. (....)
So what are your favorite lazy garden seeds to plant?  Any tips to help them survive if they're direct seeded, other than to make sure to keep them watered the first couple of weeks?

I suspect this is one of those 'it depends' questions. What grows easily will be something that is suited to your area - either native, from a similar environment, or highly adapted or adaptable. I had much better luck with annual veg in my polytunnel. I think the hotter/drier climate in there was not beneficial to my local weeds, so the veggies had a better chance.
My 'simple farming' area is using the plants I believe to have the best chance - potatoes, barley and oats, peas and fava beans, Swede (neeps/rutabaga) parsnip (I'm also trying carrots and leeks which are maybe more tricky)
We have a great thread here about self seeding vegetables, which seems like the ideal thing for a lazy gardener to aim for!

In my experience, there are a few seeds that take reliably without much human interaction.

Purple Top Turnips - I toss seeds out by hand onto dirt and forget about them. The most intervention I do is thinning plants if they are growing too close together. They are my go-to green manure these days.

Tomatoes (Cherry) - I have found small tomatoes readily volunteer in the garden. A particularly cold winter might knock out the following years volunteer amount but I get generally see them every year.

Peas/Beans - These sprout better if you individually press them into the dirt but after they are placed they take off and run on their own. As they pod, just keep picking them and they will produce. Once the peas start drying up, I'll snip just above the roots and put the greenery in with my chickens.

Lazy gardener would be best to stick to things they like to eat or that their family likes to eat.