| I'm not an apartment dweller, but love to garden (and heaven knows there are a bazillion gardening forums here, you might ask the Container gardening forum.) I'd stick with easy, low maintenance since they'll most likely be in containers.
For shade, some examples would be Impatiens and Coleus.
For sun to part Shade, pansies for spring, later petunias (trailing are nice in window boxes), marigolds, salvia, snapdragons. Those varieties will often reseed themselves in my gardens and turn up again next year ;) You're probably already aware of this, but the cool thing about starting from seed is you can get harder to find plants (not mass sold at nurseries and garden centers) and those luscious heirloom varieties (non-hybrid, you can save seed from those once you've done your first crop). I started growing heirloom Sweetpeas years ago and I have to tell you, the fragrance from them was like that of a lilac or rose bush. (The non-heirloom hybrids don't have fragrance like that.) Of course they need a trellis to grow and do get quite tall (5' easily). Super easy to start from seed, and if one could manage a pot with trellis, the fragrance wafting off a balcony into the apartment would be heavenly. They tend to peter out in hottest months, but rebound again in fall. (They like cooler weather, like Pansies, and I just kept the dried leaves pinched off mine in summer till cool fall temps hit again and got more flushes of blooms). |
