How to grow fruit, herbs and plants to eat on a balcony, patio or windowsill

Rosemary
Rosemary is cheap to buy from a garden centre, or a supermarket, or ask a neighbour.

In the UK my greatest success was with the herb rosemary.

Watering
You are suposed to water them. If you are watering anyway, good. If not, and you keep doing this, every day, or every time you pick rosemary to go on roast lamb, one day you will be lucky and the rain will do the job for you.

Apples
All the gardens on a housing estate had been plated with apple and pear trees. However isolated you were, if you were stuck in snow, or down with the flu, at least you had an apple a day throughout the winter.

Then we moved to Singapore. New climate. Living in a condo. The estate had allotments but we never managed to locate the person allocating them. We had a balcony. In fact, three balconies. One on the living room. A second smaller one by the bedroom. A third utility area in shade containng a washing machine at the back.

I visited a friend's apartment in another condo. She had every blacony filled like sardines with flower pots. More all around everywhere. Teeny cacti on the tiny windows at the tops of showers. flower pots on brackets on an inside wall over the piano. A jungle. A graden centre. Made our bare balconies look bare.




In Singapore the greatest success has been aloe vera. It was abandoned the first time for three week or nearly a month, we returned to find not the dead aloe vera we had feared to find, but a defiant doubled in size monster. It even had a baby aloe vera gowing innocently at the far end of the trough.

'Orange' tree
My second success was with what I thought was a miniature orange tree. It was identified by a local garden centre as lime. It certainly tasted bitter.

We loved our cheerful little 'oranges'.

We thought about it and commented that the oranges were bitter like Seville oranges used to make marmalade. Ah - marmalade. We used our 'oranges' to make marmalade, with one large ordinary supermarket orange added to the mixture.

That was in November 2019. By March 2020 the little tree has its second crop.

If I had more money than time, I would invest in buying a set of three miniature fruit trees in pots from a garden centre. These are sold online for delivery in the UK, and other countries. Whichever country your laptop or ipod or phone is operating in, you are likely to get ads for the same country.

But you can try planting seeds from the fruit you eat. Why grow them in water in the kitchen before planting them out? To be sure a keen gardener does not pull out the tiny shoots thinking they are weeds. Use a wooden lolly stick or improvised flag to alert yourself and anybody else that a shoot alongside is not a weed from seeds blown in or dropped by birds but a deliverately planted vegetable.

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