How Many Plants Can You Fit Per Acre?

It is easy to forget how big an acre of land is. In planning for planting I often find it useful to think about how many plants I can fit in an acre of land with a given spacing.


 

Plants per Acre Table
		Number of Plants
	Distance Apart
	3 in x 3 in	696,960
	4 x 4	392,040
	6 x 6	174,240
	9 x 9	77,440
	1 x 1 feet	43,560
	2 x 1	21,780
	2 x 2	10,890
	3 x 1	14,620
	3 x 2	7,260
	3 x 3	4,840
	4 x 4	2,722
	5 x 5	1,742
	6 x 6	1,210
	7 x 7	881
	8 x 8	680
	9 x 9	537
	10 x 10	453
	15 x 15	193
	20 x 20	108
	30 x 30	48
	40 x 40	27

Here is an example of how we'd use this chart on the farm. We plan on using half of our land to support the other half by growing compost crops on it. If we were to use comfrey as the only plant for the support section we would need 3 acres of comfrey. If we planted it with 3 x 3 foot spacing we would need to have 14520 comfrey plants on the property. (That's a lot of comfrey!)

If we were planting large trees that needed significant spacing like pecans we might use the 40 x 40 foot spacing which would give us only 27 trees per acre. We won't be, but if we did, we could plant something small like carrots with the 3 in x 3 in spacing and have almost 700,000 carrots per acre!