Space Requirements and Treating Your Soil
How much space you are willing to give to your herb garden will dictate how much soil you will need to prepare and treat. If you aren't cultivating a mini herb garden or a very large classic one, a good sized herb garden will be about eighty to one-hundred square feet. It can be eight by ten feet or ten by ten feet. If you have the space to spare, this is a pretty good sized herb garden. This may sound like a large plot, but remember that you will have to space your plants out as well. If you want a more modest size, a forty to sixty square foot garden is okay for a start!
One thing that may affect the amount of space you can give your garden or where you can situate your garden is the position of the sun. Sometimes your home or large trees create shadows or large patches of shade in certain areas of the garden. You have to place your garden in a spot that gets a lot of sun.
Treating Your Soil
Now that you have the position and space for your garden, you can begin attending to your soil. The first thing you need to do is to dig it up. Good soil is soil that is well aerated and drains well. Herbs like this kind of soil because there is space for their roots to establish themselves. Digging your soil is one way that you can achieve this. You need to dig up the soil and turn it over, and dig it up again. Never pat it down, you don't want to compact it.
You can choose to dig up the entire plot, which is a lot of work, or you can choose to dig up specific parts of the plot where you will be putting your herbs. For example, you plan to plant your herbs in neat rows. You can put a foot of space between each row. Within the row, you can put six to eight inches of space between each hole that you will dig up. These dug up holes will be where you will plant your different herbs.
One option is buying good soil to mix in with your garden soil or investing in topsoil. You can buy good garden soil, sometimes called enriched soil in most gardening stores. This can be done for garden soil that has low to medium fertility. Your herbs probably would have grown just fine in those soil conditions, but enriching it a little will be much appreciated by your plants. Mix your garden soil with topsoil in fifty-fifty percent proportions. That's fifty percent garden soil, and fifty percent good soil or topsoil.
This proportion gives the herbs a good start. You hope that by the time your plants' roots get to the less desirable soil deep in your garden, they are already well established, or you have divided or transplanted some of them already, giving you a chance to treat the soil again. Usually, there is no need to replace all the soil in your garden with enriched soil. As mentioned earlier, herbs do well in soil that is of low to medium fertility while being slightly enriched. Soil that is too rich sometimes produces herbs that are less flavorful than they should be.
On a final note, make sure you do not see any weeds or weed roots as you dig up your soil. If you do, remove these right away. Leaving weeds or their roots in your soil gives the weeds a better chance of growing again (remember, weeds are hard to kill.) This means your herbs will have a difficult time establishing roots and growing because the weeds will stifle their growth by using up all the nutrients in the soil. Try stopping the problem ahead of time by removing them even before you start planting.
