Are you looking for edible plants, or decorative? If you just want decorative, there’s lots of options for “shade tolerant” plants. Using planters on a balcony, depending on how much soil, type of soil, and your climate, you probably need to figure out what your watering requirements are. Some places, the soil stays nice and moist, in others, it dries out really quick, so you’d need to adjust your plants to that (and how good you are at watering).

It depends on the potting mix, how it drains (e.g., holes in bottom), how deep it is, material of the planter (ceramics will hold better than plastic or metal), whether rain actually hits it, wind, and sun.

Personally, I get direct sun for a few hours in the first half of the day, but I’m using thin plastic planters, so they get dried out easy. I set up drip irrigation to run during the warm half of the year. I’ve been growing basil, oregano, thyme, chives, sage, chard, mint, parsley, mustard greens, peas, and radishes. I do rosemary, too, but it seems like rosemary never does well in a planter for me. In my experience, it mostly likes being grown in the ground, and left alone.

If you just want something easy that’s also useful, throw mint in there. It grows fine in shade and cold weather as long as you water it, and it spreads really aggressively, and it will put off runners, depending on the cultivar that you can coax into looping around a railing or something. I find that it also likes lots of fertilizer to grow quickly, but I’m not sure which specific element in the fertilizer it needs (e.g. potassium, nitrates, phosphorus).