Air potatoes: source of carbs and minerals. Provides an ongoing supply. Choose the variety carefully, some need the spuds protected from light more than others do.
Tomatoes: vitamins and flavor, less gravity-dependent than some plants.
Zuchetta Rampicante squash: multi-purpose. If you know how to prepare them at the different stages of maturity, you can essentially get 4 different types of squash off the same plant (youngest tastes best raw, middle-young tastes best cooked, baseball-bat sized tasted great dehydrated, fully mature makes a great winter squash.) Some signs of lessened geotropic response, could be bred to emphasize this. (That last part in layman’s terms: it sometimes tries to grow upside down.)
Peppers: accounts from many astronauts indicate that space causes tastebuds to lose sentitivity, and creates a craving for spices or strong flavors. As a nightshade it should be less gravity-dependent than some plants.
Peas: essential nutrients and protein, keeps producing as long as it’s picked. I haven’t tested this one for geotropic ssensitivity yet.
Avoid: corn (too gravity-dependent), single-crop plants (waste of space because they need replanted after each harvest), and anything that requires more than 2 steps of processing or creates chaff (WHY does NASA keep growing wheat in space when they aren’t allowed to have bread for safety reasons?)
That’s a quick liast of what I remember from when I was designing space colonies.
(Any typos are the result of typing in the dark while half askeep.)
Oh, also avoid anything that’s difficult to pollinate!
Very cool — Thanks!