A shady balcony is not the problem you think it is

Most advice about container herbs assumes you have a south-facing suntrap, six hours of direct sun and a balcony the size of a small garden. Plenty of us have the opposite: a north-facing Juliet balcony, a courtyard corner, or a terrace overshadowed by next door's sycamore. The good news is that the herbs people actually cook with — mint, parsley and chives — are among the most forgiving plants you can grow, and several of them genuinely prefer a bit of shelter from fierce midday sun.

Shade on a balcony is rarely total darkness. Walls bounce light around, and even a north-facing spot usually gets a couple of hours of bright, indirect light plus whatever your neighbours' white paintwork reflects back at you. That is enough for a leaf crop. What you are growing for, after all, is foliage rather than fruit, and foliage plants are far less demanding about light than tomatoes or strawberries will ever be.

Start with mint, parsley and chives

These three earn their place in a low-light container garden for practical reasons, not just because they taste good together.

• Mint is close to unkillable. It tolerates part shade, spreads enthusiastically and gives you a cut-and-come-again supply from spring to the first hard frost. Grow it in its own pot — always. It runs underground and will smother anything sharing its compost within a season.
• Flat-leaf parsley is happier out of blazing sun, which is why it so often sulks on a hot windowsill. In light shade the leaves stay tender and it bolts to seed much more slowly. It is a biennial, so expect a strong first year and a weaker second before you replace it.
• Chives cope with partial shade perfectly well, though they will be thinner and slower than in full sun. Snip the leaves rather than pulling them and the clump keeps producing. The purple flowers are edible and lovely scattered over a salad.

If you want to add a fourth, chervil and coriander both do well in shade, and lemon balm behaves much like mint. Keep it to one pot each unless you have serious space.

Choose deep pots, not wide ones

Balcony gardeners tend to buy wide, shallow troughs because they fit neatly along a railing. Resist. Shallow compost dries out in a single warm afternoon and gives roots nowhere to go. For these herbs, depth beats width every time.

Aim for pots at least 25 to 30 centimetres deep, and 30 centimetres across for a single mint plant. Parsley and chives are happy in something slightly smaller, around 20 to 25 centimetres deep. Terracotta looks lovely and breathes well, but it wicks moisture away from the compost, so on a shaded balcony where things dry slowly, glazed ceramic or plastic is often the smarter choice. Light-coloured pots also keep roots cooler in summer.

Whatever you buy, check that it has proper drainage holes. If it does not, use it as a cachepot and stand a smaller, holed pot inside it.

Watering: damp roots, dry feet

This is where most balcony herb gardens fail, and it is almost always overwatering rather than underwatering. Shade slows evaporation, and a saucer left full after rain becomes a swamp with no way out.

• Stand pots on feet or small tiles so the base is never sitting flat in a puddle.
• Use a saucer to catch runoff, but empty it within half an hour of watering or after heavy rain.
• Water in the morning, aiming at the compost rather than the leaves, until it runs out of the bottom.
• Check before you water by pushing a finger two centimetres into the compost. If it feels cool and damp, wait a day.
• In a genuinely shady spot, once or twice a week is often plenty from spring to autumn, and barely at all in winter.

If you are a renter and worried about dripping onto the balcony below, a deep saucer plus pot feet solves the problem without drilling anything, and nothing you do here should leave a permanent mark on the space.

Compost, feeding and the planting itself

Use a peat-free multipurpose compost and mix in roughly a handful of horticultural grit or perlite per pot to keep it open. Line the base with a couple of centimetres of grit or broken crocks if the holes are large, but do not layer gravel over the top — it traps moisture rather than releasing it.

Plant supermarket herb pots by dividing them: tip out the rootball, tease it into two or three sections and pot each one up with fresh compost. They will look sparse for a fortnight and then take off. Water in well and keep them out of any direct sun for the first week.

Feeding matters less than you would think for these three, but a weak liquid feed every two to three weeks from April to August keeps leaves coming. Overfeed mint and you get soft, flavourless growth, so dilute to half the recommended strength.

Harvesting, pests and getting through winter

Pick little and often. Regular snipping keeps plants bushy and stops them putting energy into flowering. Cut parsley stems from the outside of the plant, never the crown, and pinch chives a couple of centimetres above the compost. With mint, take whole stems from the top and strip the leaves.

Slugs and vine weevil larvae are the main threats in damp, shaded corners, so check the drainage holes and the surface of the compost now and then. Remove any yellowing leaves promptly.

Come autumn, chives and mint die back and that is normal — keep them slightly drier, not bone dry, and they will return in spring. Parsley often survives a mild UK winter on a sheltered balcony and gives you a second flush of leaves before it finally gives up. A little patience in February is repaid generously in March.