I know these are in a Container, but just for reference. 30 inches apart is wasting too much space, in my opinion - - unless you have acreage to use.

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Raybo

In my opinion the 30 inch row spacing listed on seed packets is a carry over from commercial farming. That is the distance needed for farming equipment and people to manage and harvest the plantings. You just need to leave yourself enough room for weeding between rows if you want to plant in rows.

I like planting in 4X4 foot blocks for corn and then allowing 24 inches on all sides of the "block". This gives you access to all sides of the corn, but allows you to plant your 10 inch spacing in the entire block. This is obviously a square foot gardening concept, but it works well for corn even in smaller home plots because you get good pollination.

Here is a link that might be useful: My Garden Blog

I generally use the 'between the plants' spacing as the spacing for all directions. Sometimes, if it's completely obvious that the instructions assume traditional single rows with a big between-row spacing, I'll increase the spacing a bit to account for the fact that the plant doesn't have that row to spread its roots into.

So, for example, if instructions assumed 30 inches between single rows, and ten inches between plants in the row, then I might plant with 12 inches in all directions.

Adding to clarify: So for the "minimum of four rows" I would plant a four-foot by four-foot block, filled with plants that are all twelve inches apart. Or I might shuffle them to be zig-zagged, like your diagram, and adjust the size of the block a bit, still keeping the plants twelve inches apart if you draw a line from plant to plant. That's my interpretation of that instruction.

In my garden, we have four-foot wide wide rows with two foot paths between them. So a block of corn for me could be three adjacent wide-rows, each planted twelve feet long with corn. This would give me a "block" twelve plants wide and twelve plants long, with the width being punctuated by the two paths, and the length being unbroken.

corn spacing per 4ftx4ft block
short height varieties 4 per square foot total plants per block 64
medium height varieties 2 per square foot total plants per block 32
tall height varieties 1 per square foot total plants per block 16

In the garden....I stagger mine at 10" apart. That leaves plenty of weeding room and room to walk thru to pick.

The field's rows are 30" apart and each plant is 7" from the other.