It is so easy and incredibly rewarding to grow something to add to your supper right outside on your own little balcony space. You can get as elaborate as your space and time allows and grow a whole range of yummy things or simply add a herb planter to enhance the flavour to your meals.

Some balconies in Vancouver are incredibly windy due to their height and location and don't provide an environment to grow tall or delicate plants. Lots of balconies have incredible sun exposure which is great for some plants and terrible for others. So your first step is to figure out what the conditions are like on your balcony and pick the right plants and place them to optimize their environment as much as possible.

Use large containers to retain lots of moisture as all that sun and wind dries a planter out in no time at all. Vegetables need regular water as they grow to ensure they develop properly and their skins don't split. If you know you wont have a lot of time for watering set up a simple irrigation system with a timer connected to the tap and hoses running to the planters. You can also plant drought tolerant herbs such as rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano and catmint if you know watering is an issue but remember that all plants need regular water, it is only how much and how often that is variable. You are never completely off the hook for watering with drought tolerant plants.

If you have the space try growing cucumbers trained along a trellis in a large planter. I had great success with Marketmore cucumbers grown this way in a large planter along my super sunny south facing garage wall. I could watch them grow and harvest a lovely little cucumber almost every day. What a treat! Spacemiser zucchinni didn't like being planted among other plants but looked promising enough to try again this year in a planter on its own.

I have started seeds of all sorts of ambitious vegetable plants as I got caught up in the catalogue fever that happens when dreaming about lush gardens in the dark of winter and ordered everything that took my fancy. I don't have enough indoor shelf space to hold them all and the unheated garage doesn't seem to be encouraging life from the seeds very well. The tomatoes and artichokes I have inside have sprouted well and now I'm not sure where to put them so they get enough light and stay warm to continue growing. Maybe I will have to set-up a grow light to coax them along until they can be safely planted outside at the end of May.

So growing plants from seed is a great way to grow lots of different stuff relatively cheaply but it certainly is a lot of hard work. You also have to have the space to keep the seedlings or put up with plastic pots around the window sills and bright spots of the house. I'm now thinking that last years trip to the garden centre was money well spent to get all the healthy tender plants ready to start growing and producing for me. I may stick to buying my seedling cucumbers, zucchinis and tomatoes and planting them out with the good start they get from being grown in a greenhouse. Ask me again next winter when the promise of the seed catalogue lures me into her beguiling trap and I bet I'm starting seeds all over again and living with plastic pots all around the house.