This has drawn heavily from Ian Hall, Marcos Morcillo et al. and the excellent WA Department of Agriculture Cultivation of Black Truffles guide by Anne Mitchell and Alison Matthews. The additions are mixing in east cost data and further explanations for areas outside Manjimup, Pemberton and Northcliffe, and changes that are the result of research.
Needed. Climate change.
Site selection
If you’re considering growing truffles of whatever varieties you’ve probably a vision of the kind of land you’ll plant in.
In fact, after visiting a few truffières you can almost picture your version, planted in the old sheep paddock that you can see from the house. The gentle sweep of the tree rows on the contours of the slight slope, with the afternoon light catching the autumn foliage. You feel the chill in the air that makes a truffle grower’s heart skip. It’s a welcome change from the warmth of last summer, and while you had to irrigate for that hot month or two, the dam levels have come back with those recent rains. The few truffles that have broken the surface show some rabbit activity around them but you know that there’s more of them beneath. The surface soil is open, deep, and friable and you’ve checked the pH and you’re not concerned. There’s even a little smug satisfaction in knowing that you’ve chosen your site wisely.
Ah hum.
Let’s talk about the considerations for choosing your truffière site. Actually, they are all there in that ‘vision splendid’. Aspect, climatic conditions, soil texture and structure, past use and availability of water.
Climate
Soils
See our extensive soil section
Water
The requirements for water on your site will obviously change as the trees grow. Nursery seedlings are watered at a time they are establishing roots and to prevent them from dying until they start to draw moisture from the soil around them. Later as the trees mature, watering is needed to buffer the times when there is not enough rain, or it does not go deep enough. Properties that don’t have dams or borewater are vulnerable. The quality of those sources is also an issue if they are saline.
To calculate how much water you might need there are State Dept of Agriculture tools such as the Victorian Department of Agriculture’ s Farm Water Calculator. None of them have models for truffle orchards yet.
When choosing a growing site now, consider what that will be like in ten years time when hopefully they will be most productive. Here’s some experience from the wine industry that was present to Truffle Growers at a recent seminar by Prof. Snow Barlow.
Snow-TM-2015-PresChristine Fischers paper presented in 2009 has a good summary on requirements