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Onion Not Growing Well: Causes & How to Fix It

Your onion is leggy, its leaves are small and curled, it stalled at a small size, or it is all leaf and no fruit. Stunted or odd growth almost always comes down to light, nutrients, roots, or a virus.

Check these first

  • Are the stems stretched with long gaps between leaves? That is a lack of light.
  • Are new leaves curled, twisted, or unusually small? Think virus or sap-sucking pests.
  • Are the leaves dark and lush but there are no flowers or fruit? That is too much nitrogen.

Most likely causes

From the pests and diseases recorded for this plant, the ones whose symptoms match, most serious first. Symptoms alone rarely confirm a cause, so use the linked page to check the signs and treatment.

Onion Thrips

Fine white stippled scars run in vertical lines along the leaf surface, and the whole leaf eventually turns whitish. Growth stops and both yield and quality suffer.

How to identify and treat: Onion Thrips

Onion Yellow Dwarf

Yellow streaks appear along the leaves, which twist and lodge easily. The whole plant is stunted and the bulb and leaf sheaths bulk up very poorly.

How to identify and treat: Onion Yellow Dwarf

Thrips

Silvery white to brown scarring spreads over leaf and fruit surfaces. Flowers discolor and drop, and fruit is left with keloid-like scar tissue.

How to identify and treat: Thrips

Other possible causes

  • Fusarium Yellows — Yellowing starts on the lower leaves, the petioles twist and the plant leans to one side. …

Other symptoms on this plant

WiltingYellow leavesLeaves dyingWhite powderLeaf spotsPestsFruit problems

What other growers did about it

A page like this one can tell you what onion not growing well is and what to try. What it cannot tell you is what actually happened to someone who had it on the same plant, at the same point in the season, and what they did next.

Gadenin is a free garden journal built around that. You photograph the plant, tag what you are seeing, and the entries line up by date for each plant you grow.

  • Tag the problem and the app tells you how many other growers have logged the same thing on the same plant.
  • Growers who make their records public can be followed, so you can read what they did and how it turned out.
  • Next season your own entries come back at the same point in the year, so you check the plant before it starts.
Log this problem freeApp Store

Free on iPhone. Recording, tagging and reading public records cost nothing.

Written byYasuGrowing vegetables and fruit in Chiba, Japan, and building Gadenin. Corrections are welcome. 15 years of growing.

Read next

Onion plant guideGrowing calendarOnion ThripsOnion Yellow Dwarf

Note the planting date and each feed. Growth that stalls after a heavy feed, or fruit that never sets, is easy to diagnose from a dated log.

See what other growers did about it

Log it in the free Gadenin app and tag what you are seeing. Your photos line up by date so you can tell whether it is spreading, and you can see how many other growers have logged the same problem on the same plant, follow them and read what they did next.

Log this problem freeApp Store

Free on iPhone. Android coming later.

Gadenin free garden journalGet the app