Map your raised bed before planting day — plants per square, layout & seeds to sow
Beds are measured in feet. Only whole 1 ft squares count — a 4.5 ft side gives 4 usable squares; the rest is edge soil.
Pick a crop, set how many 1 ft squares to give it. Choose Custom to type a packet's “thin to X inches”.
Enter your bed size and add a crop to see your plan.
This planner turns a raised bed into a grid of 1 ft × 1 ft squares and tells you, crop by crop,
how many plants fit in each square, how many total plants your plan needs, and roughly how many
seeds to sow (then thin) so you don't over-buy or crowd roots. It draws a printable layout map you can copy onto the
real bed on planting day. It uses the classic Square Foot Gardening 1 / 4 / 9 / 16 model from Mel Bartholomew —
plants per side = floor(12 ÷ spacing in inches), then squared.
A 4 × 4 ft bed = 16 squares. Suppose you plan: 1 square of carrots, 1 of lettuce, 1 of bush beans, and 1 tomato.
That fills 4 of 16 squares (12 left) and needs 16 + 4 + 9 + 1 = 30 plants — the numbers that stop you buying six tomato seedlings for a square that holds one.
It's free to embed — no account or coding needed. Use the Add this tool to your website box above the guide: copy the iframe snippet and paste it wherever you want the planner to appear. See a real embed example →
Divide 12 by the plant spacing in inches, round down, then square it. 3 in → 16 (carrots, radishes), 4 in → 9 (beets, bush beans), 6 in → 4 (lettuce, parsley), 12 in → 1 (tomato, pepper, cabbage). Always round down — rounding up crowds roots.
The classic bed is 4 × 4 ft because you can reach the 2 ft center from either side. If it's against a wall (reachable one side only), keep it ~2–3 ft wide so the back doesn't become an unreachable strip — the planner flags this.
Tomato, pepper, and cabbage take 1 square each. Zucchini takes ~1 plant per 2 squares; melon and winter squash ~1 per 4 squares (centered in a 2×2 block). A trellis collapses vining sprawlers to 1 square.
Small direct-sown seed (carrot, radish, lettuce) doesn't all germinate, so over-sow ~2–3× then thin to final spacing. The seeds-to-sow number is a buying guide, not a germination guarantee.
Use the plant (thin-to) spacing, not row spacing. Square Foot Gardening ignores rows — only the in-row distance sets plants per square. Use the Custom field for crops not in the table.
Yes. 100% free, everything runs in your browser. It's a spacing/layout planner, not a yield or harvest-date predictor.
Uses the classic Square Foot Gardening 1/4/9/16 model (Mel Bartholomew): floor(12 ÷ spacing-in-inches) per side, squared. It is a spacing/layout planner, not a yield or harvest-date predictor. Plants-per-square assumes a true 12 in square, good soil (“Mel's Mix”), water and sun — in poor soil or shade plants need more room. Built-in spacings are typical packet/SFG-chart figures; varieties differ (baby lettuce vs. heads, bush vs. vine), so always defer to your packet's “thin to X inches” via the Custom field. Seed-to-sow numbers (the 2–3× factor for small direct-sown seed) are a buying/thinning guide, not a germination guarantee. Trellis figures assume the listed support; a sprawler that's 1 square on a trellis can need 2–9 squares on the ground, and tall trellised crops shade shorter ones, so place them on the north/back edge. Frost dates, succession and companion planting are out of scope — this maps a single planting of one bed. Fully client-side: no accounts, no server, no paid APIs; nothing is stored or sent.
Everything is calculated in your browser. We don't store or sell your data.