My Enoki attempts give short thick stalks, not the long thin ones. What temperature and conditions does Enoki actually need?
2 Answers
Short thick stalks instead of long thin ones almost always means your room is too warm and has too much fresh air. Enoki needs genuinely cold fruiting conditions, broadly in the range of about 8 to 15 degrees C, with very high humidity and deliberately restricted ventilation so carbon dioxide rises, which is what stretches the stalks long and keeps the caps small and the colour pale. Growers use a paper or plastic collar around the container to channel the growth upward and encourage the long form. After colonisation in the dark, the cold shock and the controlled low air environment do the work. Without a cool room you simply cannot hit these temperatures in most of India outside cold hill winters. So you need either a refrigerated grow space or a naturally cold location and season. Confirm exact targets for your strain with DMR Solan or an SAU.
Once I put my Enoki in a cool chamber and used a collar around the bottle, the stalks finally grew long and white. Warm air was my whole problem.