The Truffle armies of the Perigord have been on the march! As you know, our Truffière already stands in a great position to produce good yields of the highest quality truffles given its perfect terroir. However, to further increase our chances of success, we have started to add professionally inoculated Truffle soil around the bases of our trees. It seems like a great sin to the culinary Gods to take perfect Tuber Melanosporum Perigord Truffles and blitz them up and chuck them out into the dirt, but this is exactly what we have done. Thankfully, the truffle medium isn’t quite as expensive as the truffles themselves. We haven’t gone completely truffle mad yet!
The inoculated soil is made by finely dispersing the spores of the truffles into a sterilised carrier soil/vermiculite. At this point, it is of the highest importance that the medium is not contaminated with any unwanted fungi, especially those of the ectomycorrhizal kind. It is of course possible to do this yourself and we know many locals that do. However, we decided to buy ours from a reputable local truffle tree nursery as it has been laboratory tested and certified to guarantee the quality and purity of the substrate. The idea behind adding fresh truffle spores to the soil is to essentially induce mycorrhizes (the mutant half root half truffle magic things) in the newly developing root system of the tree. In this instance, we added the truffle medium at the edges of the developing brûlées in trenches so as to drop the ‘truffle seeds’ right at the edge of the spreading root network. This is proven to be an extremely effective method in boosting the production of the plant.
For these reinforcement rings, a circle is dug around the tree during the more dormant phase of growth. We chose a number of test trees to perform this procedure on this year with the idea to increase the treated number next year. The inoculum we used contained 10 million tuber melanosporum spores per litre of soil.
We first selected trees that were around 5 years old and showed good brûlée developing. We then dug a hole around the tree at a distance of about 50cm.
The ring was approximately 10cm deep.
The high quality inoculated substrate was added .
The ring was covered over with earth and immediately watered in. This spring and early summer saw plenty of rainfall which will help this process.
With any luck, the brûlée around these trees will become more pronounced, indicating an increase in truffle activity in the soil below. And now we wait, hoping to reap the rewards in the not too distant future.
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