Calculate how many plants fit in a garden bed with row, grid, and hexagonal spacing options.
Enter a bed's length and width plus the spacing each plant needs, and this tool returns how many plants fit for three arrangements. Row mode stacks straight lines of plants; grid mode tiles the bed with equal squares; hexagonal mode staggers every other row so the rows sit closer together. The result is a geometric maximum, not a planting plan. The usual surprise: the spacing you enter is center-to-center, so at 12 inches apart the bare soil between mature plants is well under a foot, and staggered hexagons fit about 15 percent more plants than a plain grid at the same spacing.
A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.
Input
Bed 8 ft by 4 ft, grid spacing 12 in
Expected output
32 plants (8 columns by 4 rows)
Each plant is treated as owning a 12-inch square. The bed divides into 8 whole squares along 8 feet and 4 across 4 feet, so 8 x 4 = 32. Any partial strip left over at an edge is dropped rather than planted.
Both modes divide the bed's length and width by the spacing and drop any fractional remainder: an 8-foot bed at 12-inch spacing fits 8 plants per side, and a leftover strip of a few inches plants nothing. Row mode uses the same arithmetic but lets you set a wider spacing between rows than within a row, to leave walking or weeding paths.
Hexagonal mode keeps the same distance between neighboring plants but shifts each row by half a spacing, so every plant's nearest neighbors form a hexagon. Rows then sit sqrt(3)/2, about 0.866 times the spacing apart instead of a full spacing, which lifts the count per area by a factor of 2/sqrt(3), about 15.5 percent, without any plant getting closer.
Because the rows move closer, not the plants. Staggering lets each row sit about 0.866 times the spacing below the one before it while every plant keeps the same nearest neighbors, and that denser packing gains about 15.5 percent. That holds for a uniform bed; odd dimensions and edge effects can round the real total either way.
Not by itself. The result is the maximum count for ideal geometry with uniform spacing. It ignores mature spread crowding neighbors, reach for weeding and harvest, and paths between rows. Treat it as an upper bound: when the result is marginal, drop a row or leave the edges empty.
The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.
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