Proper Plant Spacing and Why it Matters (2024)

  • March 28, 2022

By Kim Toscano

Give new plants the best possible start through careful placement in the garden.

When spring fever strikes it’s easy to come home from the garden center with a carload of new plants. Whether you are planting a flower garden, shrub bed, or vegetables, proper plant spacing is your first step to a healthier garden. It is easy to overcrowd plants when they are young, but plants need a bit of elbow room to gather sunlight, spread their roots, and simply look their best. These tips will help you achieve proper plant spacing in the garden and understand why it matters.

Why Plant Spacing Matters

One reason to consider plant spacing is curb appeal. We’ve all seen misshapen trees or shrubs swallowing the corner of a house after having been planted too close. Proper plant spacing helps us to avoid a tangled mess of branches in the garden. By giving plants enough room to grow into maturity, we ensure they remain visually pleasing long into the future.

Aesthetics aside, plant spacing is critical to ensuring long-term plant health. When plants are crowded together, they compete for water, nutrients, and sunlight. Crowded plants often bloom poorly due to poor nutrition, or because not enough light reaches the shaded branches. In a vegetable garden, this results in lower yields. By spacing plants to accommodate the expected mature size of a plant, you ensure plants have enough room to develop a healthy root system and limit competition for access to water and nutrients. As a result, plants are less stressed and more resistant to pest problems.

Proper plant spacing also allows for adequate air circulation around plants, which helps fight plant diseases. Many disease agents require a moist or humid environment to develop. In crowded plantings, reduced airflow prevents moisture from evaporating from leaf surfaces, increasing the likelihood of foliar diseases. Good air circulation through proper plant spacing helps reduce fungal diseases in the garden.

The Basics of Plant Spacing

Before you begin planting, consider the amount of space the plant will require when it is full grown. This information is found on plant tags and in catalogues. When starting with small, young plants, it is easy to set them too close together. Resist the urge to fill every gap in the garden. Remember, plants grow!

Using the information from plant labels, think of the mature size as the circle of space the plant needs to grow. A hydrangea that matures to 5 feet wide needs a circle with a 5-foot diameter. When setting out three of these hydrangeas together in a grouping, you will want to set them 5 feet apart, measuring from the center of each plant. While we commonly plant vegetables in rows, you can use the same circle-based method to save space in the vegetable garden.

When planting two plants together that mature to different sizes, consider the needs of both plants. The easy way to determine spacing between different plants is to use the average of their mature sizes. As an example, when planting a 5-foot-wide hydrangea planted next to a boxwood that grows up to 3 feet wide, space the plants 4 feet apart. Remember to measure from the center of one plant to the next.

It is a good idea to set out all the plants before digging holes. A yard stick or small tape measure are handy tools to ensure proper plant spacing. And don’t worry if the garden looks sparse at first. Young shrubs will fill out the garden in two to three years, and perennials much quicker. You can always plant annuals in open spaces until shrubs put on some size.

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Proper Plant Spacing and Why it Matters (1)

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Proper Plant Spacing and Why it Matters

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When spring fever strikes it’s easy to come home from the garden center with a carload of new plants. Whether you are planting a flower garden, shrub bed, or vegetables, proper plant spacing is your first step to a healthier garden.

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Kim Toscano

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WORX

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Proper Plant Spacing and Why it Matters (2)

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Tags : flowers, Foliage, garden, lawn, Lawn and Garden, Plant Spacing, Spring, trees, worx

Proper Plant Spacing and Why it Matters (2024)

FAQs

Proper Plant Spacing and Why it Matters? ›

By spacing plants to accommodate the expected mature size of a plant, you ensure plants have enough room to develop a healthy root system and limit competition for access to water and nutrients. As a result, plants are less stressed and more resistant to pest problems.

Why is correct plant spacing so important? ›

Spacing your plants appropriately reduces the risk of disease in two ways: contagion and improved immune system. It is easy for disease to spread from one plant to another if the plants are growing on top of one another, so plants growing too closely together are not as healthy as plants with enough space.

Why do plants need to be spaced apart? ›

The correct plant spacing prevents overcrowding. This can lead to competition for resources such as water, nutrients, and sunlight. Spacing plants allows them to spread their roots and access the necessary nutrients in the soil.

Why space is needed for plants? ›

The leaves need space so they sunlight can get to them. The roots need room to spread out to absorb water and nutrients. How much space do the plants in your Sit Spot have? Measure the distance from where one plant comes out of the ground to where the next plant comes out of the ground.

What problems can arise if plants are not spaced properly? ›

Plants need an adequate amount of room to absorb sunlight, water, and nutrients. Signs of disease may not occur immediately, but when your plants run out of room to grow and start overcrowding each other, it becomes difficult to keep space clear and allow for sunlight and air to infiltrate the soil.

How far should plants be spaced apart? ›

Some plants, such as shrubs and round-headed trees, grow about as wide as they grow tall. If figures for width cannot be found, estimate from the ultimate height. A plant that grows between 5 and 10 feet tall might be planted 7 to 8 feet apart. A shrub that grows 2 to 5 feet tall may require spacing of about 3 feet.

What is the basic plant spacing? ›

These are the basic, most frequently used spacing's in the square foot garden: The 3-inch spacing accommodates beets, carrots, onions and radishes. The 4-inch spacing is for bush beans and spinach. A 6-inch spacing is needed for Swiss chard, leaf lettuce and parsley.

What happens if you plant plants too close together? ›

Putting plants too close together in a garden can stress them out, which limits their growth, beauty, and overall health.

What happens if you space plants too close? ›

The Dangers Of Planting Too Close Together

If air can't properly circulate and the plants can't dry out between waterings, fungus sets in. Roots can rot.

How does spacing affect plant growth and yield? ›

Significantly wider spacing produced higher size of plant height, leaf length and number of leaves. Bulb length, diameter and weight also the same trend in wider spacing.

How does space affect plants? ›

To sum up, plant life depends on gravity, and auxin transport, which is regulated by gravity, plays an important role. It is thought that in the weightlessness of space the absence of gravity to regulate auxin transport results in abnormal growth and development of plants.

What is the formula for planting distance? ›

For a square bed, multiply the length of the bed by its width to determine how many plants per square foot. For a circular planting bed, you can calculate how many plants per square foot is ideal by multiplying 3.14 by the distance from the center to the edge of the bed.

Do plants like to be next to each other? ›

The process is known as companion planting. It is believed that growing certain plants in close proximity to others may help deter pests, promote growth and even improve flavor—or on the opposite end of the spectrum, certain plants, when planted close to one another, may actually stunt each other's growth.

Do plants like to be close to each other? ›

Touch, Slow Growth & Light

Although it can appear negative for a houseplant to have stunted growth, if houseplants are grouped together with their leaves touching, it's one way of ensuring they all get equal amounts of light.

Can plants have too much space? ›

A lack of space causes health problems, while too much space causes problems for maintenance. Learning how to judge how much space your plants need will help you make better decisions while gardening, designing a garden, and planning for future garden projects.

Can you overcrowd a vegetable garden? ›

They'll seem to grow well at first but then, as they get begin to reach full size, the overcrowded roots won't be able to draw sufficient nutrients and moisture from the soil and you'll get a disappointing harvest.

How does planting depth affect germination? ›

Planting conditions/depth has direct impact on seed-to-soil contact as well as seeds' access to adequate moisture and temperature. Planting too shallow may result in poor germination due to low soil moisture retention near the soil surface or seed injury due to insects or disease.

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