A balcony would be great! That's what every second apartment advertisement says as a hopeful final chord. Everyone wants one. But unlike a bathtub, the best balcony is always the one you don't have yet. Because in your mind, it's a wonderful place: Hanging garden, self-catering plantation, yoga platform, substitute vacation, barbecue academy - anything is possible. But anyone who walks through the city with their eyes open knows that the reality doesn't quite live up to this: out of ten balconies, perhaps one is really lovingly decorated. The others are either so bare and unused that they could be sold on eBay as "new", or the usual flotsam and jetsam has accumulated there over the years: Abandoned basil pots, cycling jerseys to air out, empty drinks crates, full ashtrays, copulating pigeons and pans evacuated by the fire police. The furnishings often only include a white plastic table and a sad deckchair that has never seen the sea.

What is going on with the blooming landscapes on the third floor? As a crisis-stricken balconist, I say: things are complicated. On the one hand, there is the semi-public nature of the balcony, which is literally a figurehead. You step onto it like an open-air stage and everything you stage there is also a message for the surroundings. This can be stressful, so much so that at some point you prefer to sunbathe in the park rather than on a plate. Others fail at horticulture, which is no shame - city dwellers traditionally have other talents and the microclimate on the third floor is trickier than in the front garden. Even if new non-fiction books promise a bountiful vegetable harvest in a small space every year, it takes a lot of frustration tolerance if you want to harvest more than the usual three tomatoes. And heaving bags of organic soil around the apartment and disposing of a tonne of green waste in the autumn is something you think about longer every year.

However, I believe that many people have overloaded the balcony as a desired location to such an extent that they don't even know where to start. Or they started with too much ambition and got stuck at some intermediate stage. For example, I bought pretty planter boxes, but for the last two years they have only been filled with whatever happens to fall in from the neighbor's bird feeder. So my resolution for this spring is to plan less, forget about perfectionism and neighbors and sit outside more often. Because a balcony is not a place, it's a way of life.