Last September I did something I would not recommend if you want to feel good about your balcony. I added up, roughly, everything the tomato plant had given me across the whole summer. It was a bowl. Not a bowl a week. A bowl, total, spread across about two months of picking a few at a time whenever something turned red.
I sat with that for a while. Then I went and bought seeds for the following year anyway, and I want to explain why, because I think the reason matters more than the yield does and most small space growing writing skips straight past it.
The honest math
Here is what a few pots on a narrow balcony actually produce. Herbs, continuously, in useful amounts, from spring until the cold. Salad leaves, in side salad quantities, for a few cuttings per sowing. Chilies, enough that I am not buying them for a stretch of the year. Tomatoes, as described above.
Against that: potting mix, pots, seeds or plants, and an amount of my attention that in July is close to daily. If you value your time at anything at all, this is not a saving. Anyone who tells you a balcony pays for itself in groceries is either counting only the herbs or not counting the soil.
I think it is better to know that going in. The people I have seen give up in their second year are usually the ones who were sold on the food economics and then did the arithmetic themselves.
The seed packet cost me less than a coffee, which is the other half of that arithmetic and the half I keep forgetting when I am being gloomy about yields.
What actually changes at dinner
The herbs are the part that genuinely changed how I cook, and the mechanism is not flavor, it is proximity. When there is parsley two steps from the stove I use parsley. When it lives in a plastic packet in the fridge I use half of it, the rest goes slimy, and next time I do not buy it.
That sounds like a small thing. Across a year it is the difference between finishing dishes and not. I cook better with a herb pot outside the door than I did without one, and that is a real result even though the herb pot has never produced anything you could call a harvest.
Freshness is narrow but real
There is a category of things where the gap between just picked and shop bought is large, and a category where it is not. Salad leaves cut and eaten within the hour are noticeably better than a bag. A tomato ripened on the plant and eaten warm is better than one that traveled. Basil is night and day.
Meanwhile a carrot from my pot tasted like a carrot. A potato tasted like a potato. That is roughly why my growing has drifted toward the first category and away from the second: not because roots are hard, but because the advantage of growing them yourself in a small space is small, and the space cost is large.
The Saturday habit
The part I did not expect to matter is that it gives me something to do on a weekend morning that is not a screen. Twenty minutes with a watering can, checking undersides of leaves, deciding whether the lettuce needs cutting. It is not exercise and it is not meditation and I am not going to dress it up as either. It is just a small physical routine attached to the food I eat, and I look forward to it.
Weekend scale is honestly the right scale for this. If growing on my balcony required an hour every evening I would have quit. It requires a check most days that takes two minutes and one proper session a week, and that fits into a life.
Watching a thing go through a year
The other reason is harder to justify but it is true. I now know when things happen. I know roughly when the light comes back over the building in spring, when the basil starts to actually move, when the leaves turn bitter and it is time to stop. None of that is useful information exactly. It just means the year has a shape it did not have when I lived entirely indoors.
I did not anticipate caring about that and it turns out to be the reason I have kept going through the seasons where the food was almost nothing.
Where I would tell someone not to bother
I will be blunt, because I would rather someone skip this than be disappointed by it. If your goal is to reduce your grocery bill, a balcony will not do it. If you want to grow staples, you need ground. If you have a genuinely dark space with no direct sun at any point, herbs in a pot are about the ceiling and you should not spend money on a tomato plant to find that out.
And if you cannot check on pots most days in summer, start with three pots rather than ten, because ten neglected pots is a worse experience than three tended ones and it will put you off.
But if you want a handful of things you cut yourself, a routine on a Saturday, and a tomato in August that you watched turn, then a few pots on a small balcony do that, and the fact that the total yield fits in a bowl has stopped bothering me.