My bulb onions all take five months to mature. I put them in in November, and harvest in May. Literally NO bulbs until the last month or two. You may just not have waited long enough. If you've never grown onions, one might presume that onion bulbs just get gradually bigger and bigger as the plant grows. But that's not what happens.

Those all look like immature red onions to me. They will form bulbs in a few months.

You harvested them way too soon if you were after bulbs. The tops will start to fall over and turn yellow when they are ready. The size of the leaves and stems of the plants in your pic tells me they still had at least a couple months to go before they would start to bulb. Your description of 2-3 feet high could be due to being planted too closely and them competing with each other for light (they look a bit stretched to me). But you don't say where you are, how you planted, if you fertilized, etc... so it's just speculation.

Rodney

BTW, you shouldn't need to harvest to "have a look". The bulbs will be very conspicuous at the soil surface once they start to form. If you don't see the top of a bulb sticking up out of the surface of the soil, there isn't a bulb. Why were you expecting bulbs if these were planted out in February? You shouldn't expect to see ANY bulbing until June at least. Looks to me in your picture as if some are just barely starting to swell up. Again, bulb development does NOT track the size of the plant. It happens after the plant is fully grown.

May I guess that if you're planting in February, you're up north, and these are long-day onions (e.g.Ruby)?

Thank you all for the comments. @theforgottenone1013 (SE MI zone 5b/6a) I’m in Alabama, zone 8, planted about 4” to 5” apart in raised beds in my backyard, full sun & a little fertilizer - miracle grow in a watering can 2-3x. first time I’ve ever planted onions, so don’t really know what to expect. I have a ton more planted, I really just needed the space where these were for some herbs my wife wanted, so that’s why i was harvesting these. I’ll leave the rest alone for a few more months. Thanks!

Thanks @daninthedirt (USDA 9a, HZ9, CentTX, Sunset z30, Cfa) that’s super helpful. indeed I had assumed the bulbs would track the size of the plant, so thats good to know.

I started growing onions about five or six years ago, and I was baffled that as the plants grew, bulbs did not. Kind of amazing that no one ever tells you that the bulbs don't even start to form until the very end and, at that time, they do so somewhat explosively. That's not the case with other root crops, in which the bulbs generally DO track the plant growth.

These are purplette onions. i grow them as well

You say you picked up "a bundle". Do you mean a bundle of live small plants? If so those might be bunching onions. Most folks know white ones, but they come in the other onion colors too. If you mean a bundle as in a bag of little onion sets, then it's likely they haven't started to bulb up yet.

Yes, it was a bundle of probably 30+ live small plants marked as "red onions".

If he got them in February as small plants, they'd be bulbing up around now. Dixondale sells them in bundles of 40-50 November through April.

Let them grow for another month, they are growing well. Wonder if they are really short day onions, that may be the problem. Did you get them from a box store, or a garden nursery? Bonnie plants? Maybe they were selling the wrong type for your region.

The point is that there is no obvious problem. If small plants were put out in February, they look exactly as they should right now, but will not mature for a month or two. If they are long-day onions (which would be a big marketing error in AL), THAT would be a problem, and they might refuse to bulb much at all.

Just FYI, around here, Home Depot only sells Bonnie 801 short-day onion plants, which make large reddish bulbs. Somewhat curiously, they advertise them as Walla Walla onions, which are NOT red, and which are intermediate day.

I'm not sure if there is a problem either. If they were just marked red onion they could be bunching or bulbing. If bulbing, they could be rounder ones just starting to fatten up- or perhaps one of the longer forming Italians that have been sort of popular with seed companies for a bit now. But developing along and looking good.

You can keep on pulling them to thin out and eat while developing. Onions don't really develop that dry tough outer skin on them till they are cured, so fresh eating them without much peeling is fine. If you leave a half inch or so of onion by the roots you can regrow those and get another round of onion greens :)

Just an update on the onions a month later. The plants are starting to bulb up nicely in line with what I had previously expected. Sharing some pictures, although it may be a little hard to tell. Thanks to everyone for the feedback and comments!

You now wait until the stalks fall over. Then they're ready to pull.