Best pantry filling & wallet saving produce or....contemplations of a gardening mind.

I know this question will have a different answer for different people depending on their tastes, geographic location, and economic region.  However, as I am considering what to grow in my garden this fall and into next year, I must first define my goals.  This got me to thinking about how I assign priority to what gets planted.  Things like:

-What seed do I have that is starting to get old and should be planted soon?
-What pests have I encountered previously with a given crop?
-What is relatively expensive to buy in the produce department that I can grow myself for less cash output?
-What can I successfully grow in my conditions?
-What can I grow myself that I can't get in a store?
-What seeds to I want to save from my grown produce?
-Can I plant a lot of a variety and be able to "put it up" either by freezing, canning, storing, etc.?
-How can I plan a 2 year garden to get OP seed to save from biennial crops?

For example, I love all kinds of corn and can grow it well here.  However, so can everyone else and on a much larger scale than me.  I still grow corn for my own breeding projects, but economically speaking, it's so cheap to buy good sweet corn, that the garden space could be better spent on other things.  I'm trying to figure out what those "other things" should be.

The same goes for dry beans.  I can buy a 25# bag of pintos from the store fairly inexpensively if we're talking strictly foodstuffs, but I enjoy trying to develop my own future landraces, just like with corn.

For me, melons are probably one of the more expensive fresh produce items, as we eat them all summer long, alternating between varieties.  

This year, garlic has become more expensive here, so I'm wanting to work that back into my fall plantings.  Locally, the seed stock is poor quality, so I'm wanting to source a mix of actual garlic seed instead of bulbils or bulbs, and trying to maintain OP garlic.

What do you grow & why?

Another, very important point to consider, in my mind, is what you want and will actually eat!

I try to look at what foods we really like, and eat or want to eat frequently. Then I looked at if it was possible/worthwhile to grow and prepare my own versions of those things. Could it be modified to be tastier/cheaper/easier to prepare or store/healthier? Making small changes to what we cook and eat and trying to be conscious about why we had been making our choices has made converting to more homegrown foods easier.

One of the benefits of permaculture gardening is that there is typically a ramping up of production so it has been giving me a chance to try different recipes and preservation types to see what works for us. It also means we don't waste time, effort and space on stuff we don't like.

While it is easy to make jams, we just don't eat that much of it so I've been making lower sugar fruit sauces instead that are eaten almost every day over oatmeal or bran cereal. They freeze well and cut way down on winter fruit buying.

I love that a bunch of different products stack together to make even tastier things! (For example, we get vinegar and syrup that are by products of making preserved sour cherries. The vinegar can be used in the tomato chutney "ketchup" we make. Then we make a kale/apple/carrot salad using the chutney and preserved cherries. The syrup can be used as a drink concentrate or added to other berries when cooking them as just a few examples of their many uses)

Organic berries, fresh okra, and fresh herbs need to be a big focus for me, as they're our favorites and are the most expensive in the store. I also look for varieties that I can't  find in the store, like delicata squash and purslane. If I had a limited amount of space, my other main category would be things that taste so much better when fresh, like beets and asparagus.
My space is mostly limited by the time that I can put in, so I haven't limited it to these parameters so far.

One of the big things for me is growing something that provides actual calories.  For me that means potatoes and grain.  Yes, I can buy those and they're not expensive.  If these ever comes a time when I can't buy them, though, I want to have experience growing them and already know what varieties do well for me or have saved seed that works in my location.