What is the most nutrient-dense, "come again" garden plant?

plant comfrey in shaded area of your buildings --- tastes cucumberish, high in calcium and protein (too much of it can be bad)
additionally my rabbits and goats love this stuff!

Texican has good luck with fig trees (if memory is working today!)In need of a fig expert...

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I'm also thinking olives! YUMMY!

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I'll second the idea of green beans. Some varieties produce for quite a long season and have pretty good nutrition. The bean inside will have some protein while the jacket will have lots of fiber and some of the nutrition associated with green things. They're very easy to grow, too.

Potatoes might be worth considering for their starch value. Lots of carbs. People eat little new potatoes as their peas are coming in and continue to eat them as other veggies come on through the growing season. You just have to plant enough that you don't eat them all when they're very small.

Asparagus won't feed you all year long (unless you put it in the freezer when it's abundant) but once you get a bed of it established, it's very low maintenance and a good bed can last for decades.

If you like sauerkraut, cabbage is one of the easier crops to grow. I happen to like that but also like boiled cabbage and cabbage slaw, too.

If you like brussels sprouts, they can be pretty hearty even after some freezing weather.

I don't think you're going to find too many foods that you can grow year round, at least not without some kind of greenhouse. But if you look at a combination of plants that grow throughout the year, you can almost always come up with something, even if it's just a few greens or cherry tomatoes from a greenhouse.

From what I can tell, garden lima beans aren't a popular plant around here. I have to actually grow them myself to get a few bags to put in the freezer. They're easy to grow from sowing seed directly and are maybe the last plants that pests will bother to eat. I plant in May and harvest in July by pulling up the entire plant. It's just easier to pick off the bean pods this way since it's such a low to the ground bush. Then do another planting in the same space to get another harvest in September.

As for hulling the beans, it's a shared family activity best done in front of a good movie playing on the tube. Everyone gets a 5 gallon bucket of beans, a big metal baking pan to hull in, and another big pot to put the shellies into for washing, rinsing and blanching before filling up the ziplocs and putting into the freezer. Great to cook as a pot of beans, or use in soups through the winter. I've had good luck with keeping frozen beans for several years that taste just as fresh as the day they came out of the garden. It's one of the few foods that's a stick to your ribs kind of meal where you can actually have a full stomach feeling. Limas are also a bland type of taste and take well to flavor additions such as onions, garlic, hot peppers, etc.

The limas I grow are the Baby Fordhook Limas, usually from Burpee's.

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Another vote for kale. Easy peasy to grow, does well cold, but ours hasn't been fazed by our recent 100 degree heatwave.

Super nutritious, tasty, versatile, just pull off the lower leaves as you need them and they'll be replaced at the top in no time.

Super crop..the only failure I had with it was due to a goat break out, they love it, but aside form that it's gangbusters. I've had it survive winter and come back in the spring here in Michigan.

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I saw something nasty in the woodshed

REALLY?!?!?

Did it flower and die back, or did you get another year of leaves? I am growing it for the first time this summer, and if it is going to come back then I will leave that spot in the garden alone next spring!

I'm pretty much doing something similar in that I don't want to worry with tending crops that are not as nutritious as I need them to be.

I chose Washington Giant Nettle for its nutrients, especially the iron as I am easily anemic.

I don't worry about other "greens" because we have so much Poke Salet (my favorite), Lambsquarter from spring to fall and wild mustard throughout most of the winter. I'm still trying to get some purslane growing. (My chickens ate the first planting....grrrr.) Just need to be aware of the potassium level while eating greens as too high will give me headaches.

For Vitamin C I have rugosa roses; for antioxidants I have goji, elderberry & black currants.

For protein of course I have goat meat and milk as well as chicken meat. Also, if I'm remembering correctly, there is a great deal of protein in purple hull cowpeas, which will produce wonderfully for a long time.

I have comfrey too; but use it to provide nutrients for my vegetation/fruits instead of for my family. (The goats love the flowers I cut off of this Bocking 14 Comfrey.)

And to help keep bad bugs off the plants I don't want them touching, I encourage the wild evening primroses to grow up around everything. Bad bugs love evening primroses.

Getting late, but this is all I can think of at the moment. Hope it helps.

Ernie, where on earth is "The Exodus"?

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If you have a pond or even a little man-made pond, you can grow cannas and taro. neither are known by normies to be "real food". In my little 5X6 pond i also have mint and some other stuff that really likes water. trying to find water cress, water chestnuts, water lettuce, water hyacinth here is a pain because they are considered invasive and therefore illegal.
cannas and taro may need cold protection in the winter.
i also have trouble with things like avocado and citrus because of the cold every few years. i've got loquats and fig planted. hardy kiwi. grape. not really what you are asking about, i know.
also in my little garden, 2 crops a year of black-eye peas (cowpeas) and black turtle beans. the stock originally came from the grocery store. very easy to grow, small, fun to grow because they grow so quickly.
green herbs like cilantro and basil are really high in vitamins and antioxidants. rosemary can probably handle your winters and summers. my rosemary is doing great even with our dry season.
hope that helps.

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black raspberries, very high in anti oxidants and nutritious and they produce longer than other raspberries....Jerusalem Artichokes,..just leave a small tuber or two when you dig them and you'll always have all you need, most places you can get a start for free..fruit trees and bushes are my favorite but also nuts..my hazelnut trees produced after only a couple of years.

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We covered a couple of plants last year and left others in the ground out of laziness (it was the last thing in we were eating). The covered plants we ate until January when they stopped producing. The others looked dead, but in March they all started growing again, they flowered starting in May, some lasting into June. By then our seedlings were taking off. Don't know your zone in Kansas, our lowest temps are high teens, but I'd think Michigan is colder than that.

It flowered and died back, that was the red Russian Kale that finally fell to the great goat escape. I didn't protect it in the winter as I didn't expect anything of it, I was surprized to see it again in the spring.

This year I have a regular green variety that I don't know the name of, so we'll see how it does next year.

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I saw something nasty in the woodshed

keeping picking and eating the flower buds of the kale and collards while they are small (they get woody if you let them get too long/tall). easy and tasty the second year, too.

Thanks for the kale information.

After a winter of bought vegetables, the early spring garden greens are a treasure!