I have a balcony on raised ground floor with lots of trees hiding the sun. In the summer I get a few hours of direct sunlight, not enough to get anything flowering. I attempted growing tomatoes, and ended up with the tallest, most useless plant ever. Strawberries were also mostly leaves. There is a planter integrated on the balcony design though, which is nice.
Is there anything with fun leaves I could grow ? Preferably low maintenance and resistant to low temperatures. (not necessarely frost resistant, though better)
Edit: I also generally can’t keep stuff that flowers, hence my request.
Are you looking for edible plants, or decorative? If you just want decorative, there’s lots of options for “shade tolerant” plants. Using planters on a balcony, depending on how much soil, type of soil, and your climate, you probably need to figure out what your watering requirements are. Some places, the soil stays nice and moist, in others, it dries out really quick, so you’d need to adjust your plants to that (and how good you are at watering).
It depends on the potting mix, how it drains (e.g., holes in bottom), how deep it is, material of the planter (ceramics will hold better than plastic or metal), whether rain actually hits it, wind, and sun.
Personally, I get direct sun for a few hours in the first half of the day, but I’m using thin plastic planters, so they get dried out easy. I set up drip irrigation to run during the warm half of the year. I’ve been growing basil, oregano, thyme, chives, sage, chard, mint, parsley, mustard greens, peas, and radishes. I do rosemary, too, but it seems like rosemary never does well in a planter for me. In my experience, it mostly likes being grown in the ground, and left alone.
If you just want something easy that’s also useful, throw mint in there. It grows fine in shade and cold weather as long as you water it, and it spreads really aggressively, and it will put off runners, depending on the cultivar that you can coax into looping around a railing or something. I find that it also likes lots of fertilizer to grow quickly, but I’m not sure which specific element in the fertilizer it needs (e.g. potassium, nitrates, phosphorus).
I don’t really have a plan yet, I am hoping to develop one until march or so. There are already a lot of edible things in the list and they all sound lovely, so that might be the direction I go towards.
Mint is now also definitely on my list ! (at this rate, I will need some smart vertical planting system very soon)If you plant mint anywhere, just know that it will take up the whole area, and eventually, it will be only mint in the planter. If you want other stuff, too, keep the mint in something separate
Besides the suggestion about shade-tolerant plants, I strongly recommend finding a localized book. Your local librarian likely knows what people use.
This is what gets used in some parts of coastal California, and the suggestions in it might work well in some parts of France, but it’s probably not ideal for where you are.
I live in an apartment. I’ve had good luck with things like sage, thyme, lavender, etc.