And hard to kill?
I’m thinking about borrowing a corner of my Mom’s garden this year, and planting a few things. The only hugely producing hard-to-kill veg I know is zuchinni. Fortunately I’m the only person on the planet that loves zuchinni.
Any other recommendations for plants that thrive under benign neglect and brown-thumb-ness?
I beg your pardon! Three generations and more of zucchini-pancake, zucchini-bread, zucchini casserole, and stewed zucchini, tomato, and onion-eating family members (myself included) take umbrage! 
Onions and potatoes are pretty fool-proof but potatoes usually need a lot of room to grow (they root like nobody’s business) and don’t appreciate being grown in the same soil year after year. Both are attractive because they keep really well in storage.
ETA: Cabbage is a really hardy little cuss, too. And if you grow cabbage, onion, AND potatoes, you’ve got a perfect meal. Just add sausage.
Eggplant, cucumbers, and yellow squash seem pretty darn tough too.
Toma… Oh you said vegetables. :o Carry on.
Go to the supermarket. See any vegetables that are really cheap? Those are the ones that will be easy to grow in your garden.
Tomatoes are vegetables and fruits simultaneously. The OP also mentioned zucchinis, which are also both vegetables and fruits. They are not mutually exclusive terms and neither are without a degree of ambiguity in everyday speech.
Pedantry begets pedantry.
Also, lots of people have more than a little trouble getting tomatoes to grow really well. Which is why my family’s farm market often sold young tomato plants pre-started for customers who wanted to transplant them into their home gardens.
Carrots. You just stick the seeds in the ground as soon as it’s thawed enough to dig, forget about them for about 6 months, and then pull them out once you can see them poking above the surface.
Leafy vegetables in general also tend to be low-maintenance, but you’ve got to be careful of hot spells, which can cause them to bolt (spinach especially has this problem). You can get around this by either planting non-bolting varieties, or by re-planting if they do bolt (most leafy things will grow fast enough to get in two or more full harvests).
Assuming you were starting to say “tomatoes”, of course they’re vegetables. In what sense could they possibly not be? But while they probably are easy to grow in Atlanta, they’re not so much as far north as Toronto. Or rather, they’re easy, but they’re not reliable: The growing season is too short to really depend on most varieties.
As long as you fertilize heavy before planting, Brussels sprouts and cabbage are easy to grow. Radishes and Lettuce for their spring counterpart.
Good point. Hadn’t noticed the OP’s location. Tomatoes wouldn’t be terribly reliable in colder climates. Even my family imported plenty of our tomatoes from Tennessee during the early and late parts of the season, when even the Northern Ohio climate was a touch too chilly. Toronto would no doubt be much shorter.
What’s easy to grow depends on climate and soil. Where I live (San Francisco Bay Area) Swiss chard practically grows itself.
I remember not being able to give away all the extra zucchinis we had after simply plunking a few seeds in the ground.
Oh. The Op lives in Toro… 
smack: Carry On.
I didn’t even have to pluck the seeds in the ground - my compost pile didn’t kill them, and they started growing all over. I transplanted a few, and had lots of volunteers.
You don’t have to be stuck with zucchini only. I’ve grown French zucchini (white) and eight ball squash very successfully.
We had good success with broccoli and cauliflower this winter. Besides the already mentioned onions, leeks do well also.
The secret is really the soil. I don’t have nearly as much time as I want to do anything more than water and feed the garden over the summer, but I’ve worked on my soil for 10 years and it has gone from clay to beautiful crumbly loam. The secret is composting and horse poop. Find a barn, ask for some bags of manure (they have to pay to get it taken away - they should be happy to oblige) and put it into the soil in the fall.
Chard (Silverbeet down under) is virtually indestructible once it’s gotten going, as is winter spinach and many of the Chinese Greens (see Bok Choy and others). Pumpkins (especially the butternut variety) do well in most climates, and positively thrive in their maturing with a goodly frost.
Of course, there’s always zucchinis…even though we’re at the end of summer now in the southern hemisphere, I’ve planted some seeds in a huge pot that sits on my north-facing verandah soaking up the heat and the radiant sun (it’s still 30c most days). And they are just champing like the proverbial horse at the bit!! I expect flowers and then fruits within about 4 weeks. Luckily there’s plenty of bees around to do the pollinating stuff as well.
Bell peppers and jalapeno peppers.
Tomatoes actually grow quite well in Toronto, as long as you take care to water them regularly and put them in a sunny patch.
I grew some yellow miniature plum tomatoes last year that produced prodigious quantities of fruit, and this year I’ll be adding a full-sized zebra-striped variety to the mix. Any variety of tomato plant you buy in a local nursery will have been selected for its ability to produce a good-sized crop within the relatively short season (if anything, you’ll end up with more tomatoes than you know what to do with).
I’ve also had a lot of luck with wax beans and green beans, though you do need several plants if you want to get a reasonably-sized crop. Sweet peas and scarlet runner beans are also nice, since they bloom prettily on top of producing tasty edibles. I’ve yet to try any greens, but you should be able to grow spinach, chard and salad greens just fine (we grew a mesclun mix in Halifax without a problem, and they have a much shorter summer there).
I know you didn’t mention fruit, but rhubarb is practically impossible to kill. The only catch is you need to wait a year or two for it to establish itself before you can start harvesting. Raspberry bushes also do very well around here, and you don’t need many bushes to get a decent crop.
I should mention that peppers, for whatever reason, don’t seem to thrive here. The smaller varieties of hot peppers don’t do badly, but full size bell peppers usually come out tasteless and thin.
BTW, want some seeds? I’ve got a decent selection sitting around, so you’re welcome to help yourself.
Not in Toronto! Heck, I have a hard time with peppers (and especially Bell peppers) in Kentucky. They require too much heat–I do get jalapeños to grow well, but even they don’t start fruiting until the end of the season.
You should do well with chard, spinach, and any of the brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, arugula, etc.), since they like it cool and bolt as soon as it gets warm. Broccoli Raab is especially nice, since you can get varieties that are ready in as few as 40 days or so.
Tomatoes don’t have to be hard to grow, I’m a novice gardener myself, this is the first season I’ve seriously gotten into gardening, and seeing as Maine has a very short growing season (especially with this snowy winter), we have to start our plants indoors
that said, I have a “Salad Pot” a 14" deep pot with cherry tomatoes, basil, and bush cucumbers in it, I was planning on scattering some lettuce seeds on top of the pot and having lettuce, tomato, and cukes in one pot, but the tomatoes are growing so prolifically that there’s simply no room for the lettuce
the tomatoes in that pot were sprouts I rescued from my Aerogarden cherry tomato kit, planted in dirt, the salad pot recieves no special treatment, I just put it in the sunroom and make sure it’s watered, water, potting soil mix, and sunlight, that’s all that’s needed, the sunroom can get down into the low 60’s at night, and into the high 80’s during the day, the temperature extremes don’t seem to bother the tomatoes at all, they’ve set out a massive amount of blooms and the first baby tomatoes have started developing
If you have a decent sunny window, you may be able to grow tomatoes indoors, there are some cherry tomato species that stay short (Micro Tom tomatoes are a hybrid determinate tomato plant that get no higher than 8" tall, Tiny Tims are an open-pollinated heirloom determinate that grows to about 12-15" tall) and can be grown like houseplants
the cherry tomatoes I have growing in my Aerogarden are producing much faster than in dirt, I’m already on my second harvest, both the dirt tomatoes and the hydroponic tomatoes were started back in November, the dirt tomatoes are just barely starting their first crop
I am both pleased and angered to hear this. I was growing cherry tomatoes in my Aerogarden with the hope of an early harvest in anticipation of starting seeds for the outdoor garden. When we got clobbered by the ice storm in January, the five days without power (thus, no lights and no heat) resulted in severely crippled plants that had to eventually be euthanized (after much pruning and gnashing of teeth). The sad sight of dozens of wee green cherry tomatoes fallen around my aerogarden… that may have been the worst part of that week!
Ahhahahahahahahah! Sorry. “Water regularly” isn’t in my vocabulary. We’ll probably go up once or twice a week. And yes, I’d love some seeds.
I was thinking about sage and mint (because I know I can’t kill mint). My parents’ garden doesn’t get a huge amount of sun, but I could try some tomatoes, squash of different kinds, and maybe cucumber. I have a feeling they’ve tried potatoes and carrots without much luck. And I am seriously The Plant Killer, so I want stuff that will really resist my death-dealing.
Hot peppers would be nice. I think they’ve already got rhubarb.
We don’t have sunny windows. We have trees all around our apartment building, and we face north. I might be able to get a big pot and stick it somewhere sunny in the garden. We’ll see.