How far apart should you plant your walnut trees?
Choosing a spacing that fits your variety, your soil, your water and the machines you actually own.
Spacing decides how many trees you buy, how much your irrigation costs to install, and how hard your orchard is to manage in twenty years.
This chapter helps you choose a spacing that fits your variety, your soil, your water, and the machines you actually own.
There is no single correct spacing
The same variety can need different spacing on two different farms. Seven things decide the answer, and they split neatly into what the site does to the tree and what you do to it.
What the site does to the tree
- Variety vigour and shape. Some varieties grow upright and compact. Others spread wide. A wide, vigorous variety needs more room.
- Soil depth and fertility. Deep, fertile soil grows bigger trees than shallow or poor soil.
- Water. A tree with all the water it needs grows more canopy than a tree under stress.
- Climate and length of growing season. A long, warm season gives more growth each year than a short one.
What you do to the tree
- How you plan to prune. A traditional, long-lived tree and a mechanically hedged tree need different spacing from the start.
- Your machinery. Whatever sprayer, shaker, mower and trailer you own has to fit down the row once the trees are mature, not just on planting day.
- How long you want the orchard to last. A short, intensive planting and an orchard built to last forty years are different designs.
How many trees fit on your land?
| Spacing (row × in-row) | Trees per hectare |
|---|---|
| 10 × 10 m | 100 |
| 8 × 8 m | 156 |
| 8 × 6 m | 208 |
| 7 × 6 m | 238 |
| 7 × 5 m | 286 |
| 6 × 5 m | 333 |
These are geometric figures for a perfect rectangle. In practice Waltree plans a 7 × 5 m orchard at 280 trees per hectare, not 286, because headlands, roads and access take real ground out of every block — and 280 is the figure behind our yield tables and our land calculators. Expect the same on your own field.
Wider or closer: what you are really deciding
More trees per hectare
- More leaf area in the early years, and often an earlier first crop.
- More trees to buy.
- More rows to water, and a bigger irrigation system to install.
- More pruning to manage once the canopy fills in.
Fewer trees per hectare
- Less to spend at planting.
- Each tree has more room, for longer.
- It takes longer for the orchard to use all its land and light.
Twice the trees does not mean twice the harvest at maturity. Once the canopy closes, what matters is light reaching the productive wood, not how many trunks are standing. Planted too close, trees shade each other, dead wood builds up inside the canopy, and you end up pruning just to let light back in.
Match the spacing to your variety
Vigour and habit differ enough between varieties to move the answer by a couple of metres. Find yours, and treat the third column as a starting point rather than a rule.
| Variety | Vigour and habit | What that means for spacing |
|---|---|---|
| Chandler | Moderately vigorous. Spreads sideways rather than up. | Around 7 × 5 to 8 × 6 m suits it well for a long-lived orchard. Closer is possible, but only with a real plan for pruning it back once the canopy meets. |
| Fernor | Medium vigour, less vigorous than Franquette. | Real flexibility. Growers plant it anywhere from wide 10 × 10 m systems to close 8 × 4 m fruiting hedges — but the hedge needs regular mechanical pruning to stay productive. |
| Howard | Somewhat less vigorous than Chandler on the same site. | A better fit for a closer or hedged system, where that is what you want. |
| Tulare | Grows upright, but is still a vigorous tree. | An upright habit does not mean it needs less room. Check how it performs locally before spacing it tight. |
| Lara | Vigorous, early into leaf. | We have found no reliable spacing trial data for Lara. If you are planting it at scale, ask us or your local extension service for evidence from a nearby orchard before you finalise the spacing. |
| Robert Livermore | Moderate vigour. Grown for its red kernel rather than for tonnage. | No published spacing guidance exists for it either. Treat it like Chandler as a starting point and ask before committing a large block. |
| Franquette (pollenizer) | Vigorous, large tree. | Give it more room than your main variety, and place it where its size will not shade productive rows. |
| Fernette (pollenizer) | Moderate vigour. | Fits a spacing similar to Fernor’s. Plan its position on the map before you order trees. |
Row direction and site layout
North to south rows usually give trees the most even light through the day. Start there, but do not let it override everything else.
- Frost drainage. Cold air flows downhill like water on a still night. Never run a road, hedge or bank across the bottom of a slope — it dams the cold air exactly where you do not want it.
- Slope and erosion. Rows running straight down a slope can channel rainwater and wash out your soil. Coordinate row direction with drainage.
- Wind. Pollen has to travel between rows at bloom time. Keep that in mind when you set the direction.
- Field shape. A perfect north–south grid on an awkward field can waste a lot of land on odd corners. Weigh the light advantage against the wasted ground.
- Irrigation. Row length and direction affect water pressure and pipe runs. Plan your rows and your irrigation on the same drawing, not one after the other.
Design around your machinery from day one
A spacing that looks fine on paper can be unworkable once trunks and canopies mature.
Leave room to turn and load
Every orchard needs space at the end of each row for machinery to turn, plus internal roads, a place to load the harvest, and access for your pump and filter station. Work out how much space your equipment actually needs to turn safely, and reserve it before you calculate how many trees you can order — not after.
Plan your pollenizer rows now
Decide where your pollenizer trees go before you stake a single row. Adding or moving them later means grafting into an established orchard, which is slow and does not always work well.
How many you need, and how they are laid out, differs by variety — each of our variety pages gives the split we recommend for that one. If you are unsure, send us your block plan and we will mark them for you before you order.
What happens once the canopy fills in
Spacing is a decision for the whole life of the orchard, not just the first few years. Once trees meet in the row, you need a plan to manage them — and there are only three.
| Approach | What it does | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Mechanical hedging | Controls canopy width and reopens machinery access. | It removes wood, and the tree has to rebuild it. Chandler can take three to four years to regrow the branching it had, with less crop while it recovers. |
| Structural pruning by hand | Removes crowding, dead and diseased wood while keeping the productive shape of the tree. | Skilled labour, every year. But it does not set the tree back the way hedging can. |
| Planned tree removal | Plant extra trees for early yield, then remove a share once the permanent trees need the room. | Only works if you decide the removal date before you plant, not once the orchard is already crowded. |
Mistakes worth avoiding
Judging the density
- Copying another orchard’s spacing. Their soil, water and machinery may be nothing like yours. Judge your own site’s vigour instead.
- Choosing density for early yield alone. A few extra years of early crop can turn into a decade of crowding if the mature canopy was never planned for.
- Assuming you can hedge your way out of a mistake. Hedging is a real, ongoing job with a real cost. Plan it in from day one, or plant wider instead.
Laying out the block
- Skipping the machinery test. Do not discover your equipment does not fit once the trees are mature and grown together. By then it is too late to change the spacing.
- Forgetting headlands and roads until the end. Reserve that space before you calculate your tree order, not after.
- Forgetting where the pollenizers go. Put them on the map before you order trees, not after you notice a poor nut set.
Before you plant
Nine things to settle on paper
- Net plantable area, after roads, headlands, drains and buildings are taken out.
- Variety, and what you expect its mature vigour to be on your soil.
- Row spacing × in-row spacing, and the resulting trees per hectare.
- The largest machine you will use, and the row width it needs at full canopy.
- Headland width, based on your equipment’s actual turning circle.
- Row direction, checked against light, slope, frost drainage and wind.
- Irrigation zones and pipe runs, designed on the same plan as the rows.
- Pollenizer variety and position, marked on the final map.
- Your plan for managing the canopy once it fills in: hedging, pruning or planned removal.
Work through that list before you order trees. Every item on it is cheaper to settle on a drawing than in a planted field.