I see discussion on potatoes, but potatoes are cheap at the store. It seems to me that if you are worried about cheap you'd want to focus on high value crops. Plant some fruit trees. Grow tomatoes, cantaloupes, peppers, green beans, and other things that are more expensive. Then plant potatoes if you've got space, time, and resources leftover.
Agreed. Herbs are a good investment to grow your own, for instance. Also, unique varieties. But potatoes, onions, and various other root crops just aren't worth growing your own if space and time are limited.
If your only goal is to save money, you may be right. But I still grow potatoes, onions, carrots, beets and daikon radishes.
If you normally spend a lot of money on herbs that's true. But if you fancy fancy potatoes, growing them is a good option. In the last week, I've dug up at least 10# of beautiful, organic red, yellow and blue new potatoes better than the ones that go for $2.99/lb at the co-op. The plants that have been watered incidentally while watering other things in the same bed had some bigger potatoes, but the other ones are good too, and I've done exactly nothing since throwing them in the ground and dropping some straw mulch on top. Looking forward to when the fingerlings are ready to dig. The local feed store sells red, blue and gold seed potato for 59 cents a pound in the spring, and fingerlings are like $1.99, but a lot of my taters come from volunteer plants, since I invariably miss a couple when harvesting, and they spring up the next year.
Onions, I both grow and buy. It's worth it to me to grow red and sweet onions, but then I buy a 50# bag of yellow onions each fall because mine never grow that big and uniform, and I don't want to devote enough space to grow 50# worth when I can buy them for $12. Same thing with plain russet potatoes, though I might try dry-farming some next year.