How many plants fit in a bed?

There are two honest ways to answer “how many plants fit here.” The first is square-grid geometry: divide the bed length by your spacing, divide the width by your spacing, and multiply. It is exact and easy to picture, but it usually understates what intensive growers actually plant.

The second is intensive-bed density — plants per square foot at a given spacing, drawn from how cut-flower growers really fill beds. At 9-inch spacing, that is about 1.63 plants per square foot, which is more than a naive grid suggests because plants are offset rather than lined up in a strict square.

However you count plants, you should start more seeds than plants. Germination is never 100 percent, and some seedlings will not make transplant quality. A 10 percent buffer is a sane default: for 356 plants, start about 392 seeds.

That buffer flows straight into trays. At 72 cells per tray, 392 seeds means six trays. Rounding always goes up — you cannot sow a fraction of a cell.

Enter your real bed dimensions and the crop you are planting. The calculator will pick the right model, show the density it used, and fall back to transparent grid geometry when no density preset exists for your spacing.