[Matplotlib-users] xticks space problem

Hello,
I am not able to get nicer spaces between the xticks with the following
code:

*import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

coverages = [random.randint(1,10)*2] * 100
contig_names = ['AAB0008r'] * len(coverages)
fig = plt.figure()
fig.clf()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

ax.yaxis.grid(True, linestyle='-', which='major', color='grey',
      alpha=0.5)

ind = range(len(coverages))
rects = ax.bar(ind, coverages, width=0.2, align='center', color='thistle')
ax.set_xticks(ind)
ax.set_xticklabels(contig_names)
#function to auto-rotate the x axis labels
fig.autofmt_xdate()

plt.show() *

How to get more space between the xticks so they do not look like
overlapped anymore?

Thank you in advance.