Coriander: plant running up to flower before it is ready to eat

What it is likely to be on coriander

1. Bolting

   Candidate 1very common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Coriander — bolting

   Checked 2026-08-13

   A plant switching from leaf or root production to flowering and seed. It is the plant doing exactly what it evolved to do under stress, and it cannot be reversed — which makes bolting a problem of timing and cultivar choice rather than of treatment.

   Points towards it

   • · heat is the trigger, and a few hot days are enough
   • · drought stress brings it forward even without a heatwave
   • · long summer days and warmth together are what push it up

   Argues against it

   • · a plant that has just been moved bolted from disturbance rather than from heat

   Check this next

   Think about the weather in the week before the stem appeared rather than about the plant. Heat-driven bolting hits a whole sowing at once, and every plant in the row runs up together within a few days of each other.

   What to do now

   Nothing reverses it, and pinching the flower stem out buys days rather than weeks. Let this batch flower and collect the seed, which is coriander in its other form, and sow a fresh short row every three or four weeks in the coolest spot you have.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Coriander — growing

   Checked 2026-08-13

2. Transplant shock

   Candidate 2common on this plant

   ·source

   Sourced guidancemoderate confidence

   • Garden Organic — Garden Organic (Henry Doubleday Research Association): Coriander

   Checked 2026-08-13

   Wilting, leaf drop or a stall in growth in the days after repotting, planting out or moving. Often not a problem at all but a normal adjustment, and the commonest mistake is to react to it by changing something else — which turns a recoverable check into a real decline.

   Points towards it

   • · coriander makes a taproot and runs straight to flower when it is broken or disturbed

   Argues against it

   • · a plant that has not been moved cannot have been disturbed — this rules it out entirely.

   Check this next

   Ask whether this plant was ever moved — bought as a pot and planted out, or pricked out from a tray. Disturbance-driven bolting shows up within two or three weeks of the move on the plants that were moved, while an undisturbed direct sowing beside them carries on.

   What to do now

   Sow direct where it is to grow from now on, thinly enough that you never have to thin or transplant. Coriander sold as a growing pot is the same problem in advance: it has already been root-disturbed once and will usually run up soon after you plant it.

   ·source

   Sourced guidancehigh confidence

   • Royal Horticultural Society: Coriander — sowing

   Checked 2026-08-13

Narrow it down

This page lists everything at once, which is the right shape for reading and the wrong shape for deciding. The interactive tool asks one question at a time, starting with whichever would separate these causes fastest, and stops as soon as further answers would not help.

Opens with the plant and the symptom already set. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere — the answers live in the address bar and nowhere else.

What this does not cover

These are the causes GrowingHQ holds rules for on coriander — not every cause there is. Where several problems look alike, the honest answer is often that they cannot be told apart by eye, and a page that named one would be guessing. If none of the above fits, the general plant running up to flower before it is ready to eat page lists causes across all plants, and the Coriander profile lists the problems it is prone to.