If you plant side to side or walking backwards you can get your plants too close together and they will wither because they don't have enough space BUT if you plant walking forward the plant in your "hand" stays red (just like it is in your screen shot) until there is enough space between it and the previous plant (provided you don't deselect the cultivator). If you try to plant when its still red you will get a "need cultivated soil" error (even thought the soil is cultivated). As long as you keep the plants in a straight row (you can use wooden floor tiles or stone tiles on the edge of your garden as a guide) you can plant extremely long rows.

You can then use the distance between the plants you planted walking forward as an estimate of how far away to plant your next row. Carrots, turnips, and onions all need about .7 meters of space to be healthy.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2857321032

I'd say an allowance feature

Are you trying to make your farm pretty, or do you just not want to plant your crops too close together?

IMO, the easiest way to ensure that plants are not too crowded is to not plant them too close together. The best way to ensure that is to give them plenty of space. That may sound like I'm stating the obvious, and I am, but many still don't get it.

Valheim is a big world. You don't need to optimize your planting space. Just make your farm a bit bigger, to allow you to space out your plants a bit more. You can then just plop them in the ground and not worry that they're too close. It goes much faster and is much less of a chore.

Originally posted by Faceplant8:

Are you trying to make your farm pretty, or do you just not want to plant your crops too close together?

IMO, the easiest way to ensure that plants are not too crowded is to not plant them too close together. The best way to ensure that is to give them plenty of space. That may sound like I'm stating the obvious, and I am, but many still don't get it.

Valheim is a big world. You don't need to optimize your planting space. Just make your farm a bit bigger, to allow you to space out your plants a bit more. You can then just plop them in the ground and not worry that they're too close. It goes much faster and is much less of a chore.

What you say does make sense, but I still have this urge to optimize every bit of space that I can. It's just a habit ingrained in my very being that encompasses things from planting to building. Really irks one of my friends, too, because she feels so claustrophobic in every building I make, heh heh.

But yes; OP, Face is correct here. No real need to optimize for space, with the possible exception of using less materials to wall the place in.