I've grown my own food and done farm work since I was a kid, and for you city slickers trying to grow food on your deck/porch/fire escape, your best option is spinach. Grows fast, needs less light, high nutrition value, can be partially picked and keep growing for re-harvest.

I'm seeing some of you try to grow things like broccoli in pots on a deck, and you can but remember, broccoli takes a long time to grow, 100-150 days from seed, and it's a cool weather plant. You plant now, you harvest in summer when broccoli tends to bolt, and only get one crop.

If a plant bolts that means it's trying to go to seed, and the plant usually becomes bitter. So cool weather plants need cool weather. Plant broccoli now in city heat next to bricks and concrete, high chance of an early bolt. It's best to plant broccoli in summer for fall harvest

But if you grow spinach, it matures every 45 days, so you get three harvests in the same pot for every one broccoli harvest. Spinach only needs about 4 hours direct sun. You city types, do you know how much direct sun you get on that fire escape? If you don't know...

You may end up planting things like tomato or other sun-needy plants that don't produce because you aren't getting enough sun. Your plants will produce leaves but no fruit. And do you have flowers around to attract pollinators? You need to have some to bring them to your veggies.

Lettuce is incredibly easy to grow, little nutrition value in some, but the roughage is good for you and it can be ready to eat in 35 days from planting, can tolerate partial shade, and loose leaf can be picked from outside the plant and the plant will keep growing as you pick.

So, when planting you have to consider yields per square foot, so something like spinach is high yield per square foot and broccoli is low yield. Broccoli is a huge amount of space for 150 days for one item. But the same space would give you 4-5 yields on spinach/lettuce.

Now spinach and lettuce are usually cold weather plants, but there are varieties you can buy that tolerate heat, so as the cool weather variety withers, replant the box with heat resistant varieties and harvest in the summer as well.

So, the things to consider: hours of direct light per day, average temperature (include the reflected heat from your building,) yield per square foot, nutritional value of plant, attracting pollinators, ease of care.

If you've got a good sun, plant a container tomato. With care a tomato can produce like crazy. DO NOT OVERFEED, because too much fertilizer give you leaves and no fruit. But the right balance, and a single tomato plant can produce 10+ pounds even grown in a pot.

Coordinate with friends and neighbors, you get someone growing tomatoes, someone growing cucumbers, someone growing greens, then you can trade. Anyway, good luck with that Victory Garden, city slickers, you can do it!

Oh, one more quick thing, remember there are hundreds of varieties of common veggies, for example there are tomatoes that come in all colors, that tolerate different kinds of weather. Determinate and indeterminate tomatoes. So, do some research.

One of my favorite tomatoes is Green Zebra: great flavor and it never turns red and can be grown in containers. You can only tell it's ripeness by touch. But it's not the green tomato of Fried Green Tomatoes fame. A fried green tomato is a fried unripe tomato. And it's delicious.

OK signing off, but here's a post on my old blog entitled Subversive Urban Vegetable Gardening, using decorative, edible plants in your space to grow food while not giving shock to the neighbors. And I posted a picture of a fox. https://www.adistantsoil.com/2012/08/03/subversive-urban-vegetable-gardening-get-around-your-homeowners-association-or-city-council-rules-with-five-edible-decorative-plants/

I'm no longer doing major in ground gardening like this for myself, but here's a look at my veggie plot from when I did. Lettuces, leeks, and cabbage with a big goji berry plant in the back. Very invasive, plant needs to be controlled. But young leaves are edible.