Hi Bill,

Yes, cutworms sometimes do eat young onion transplants, although it seems more common in commercial onion fields than in home gardens.

Sluggo Plus, an organic product with iron phosphate and spinosad as the active ingedients, is labeled for use to control cutworms. I began using it to control pill bugs and sow bugs several years ago, and immediately noticed that about 98% of my cutworm problems vanished.

There are a lot of onion pests and they fall into three categories:

Chewing Insects -- fall armyworms, armyworms, flea beetles

Sucking Insects -- onions thrips, western flower thrips, spider mites

Soil-dwelling Insects -- onion maggots, white grub worms, wireworm and cutworms

There's probably some sort of synthetic pesticide labeled for use on cutworms, but I don't use synthetic pesticides so I don't know which one it would be.

Sometimes, when you suspect cutworms, you can use a trowel to gently dig around in the dirt at the base of the plants and you'll find the cutworms there.

Good luck getting rid of them before they get all your onions.

Dawn

The year we let winter weeds grow in the garden and didn't till untill right before planting, we lost almost 1/2 a row of onions to cutworms, and I know it was cutworms because I found a dozen or more like Dawn described. Keeping the garden clear of weeds or cover crop over the winter discourages cutworms. They do move through the garden at night on the soil surface so if you go out with a flashlight you may see them. They crawl on their backs.