The thing I love about truffles is not so much the fact they are a delicacy, which is
great, but I just love how cool they are. They are so interesting.
They have such an interesting biology, and they are basically unknowable.
The kingdom of fungi just fascinates me, and truffles are an incredible example of that.
The aroma is the thing that makes the truffle so important in its own kingdom and also for
humans and for animals. And it’s been said that the aroma of the
truffle is one of the most seductive to mammals. People think of them as a gastronomic delicacy,
which they are, and they are delicious, but the thing that fascinates me most about them
is the way they live and the way they reproduce, which we know very little about, and the incredible
relationship they have with our trees. So, the truffle itself is actually the fruiting
body of fungus. So, it’s like a mushroom, but it’s an
underground mushroom. But the tumba mel/// sporum or the truffle
fungus is actually the fruit of a mycelium which grows under the ground.
And that mycelium coats every root of the host tree like a glove, called a mantle.
Then it grows into the ground, and it creates these vast networks.
When the truffle wants to reproduce, Which we don’t exactly know how they do
it, it creates this fruiting body called a truffle.
So, the truffle holds all the spores of the mycelium. And that relationship is a symbiotic
relationship but it’s also a lot more complicated than that.
The truffle will give the tree nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen and the tree gives
the truffle carbon and carbohydrates, so they do interact but they also have a slightly
competitive feel in that relationship and it’s a really complex one.
There have been a lot of studies on it recently from Italy and France.
People are getting super interested in truffles. This will be our last walk through with the
dogs this year. We’ll start doing some pruning of the trees.
That could take up to an hour per tree and with 317 odd trees that’s a lot of pruning
that takes place. Soli sampling, checking all of the irrigation
lines and keeping the grass trimmed. And the main thing is to make sure that the
soil is a t the right PH level and the irrigation is fine.
And keeping the wombats and wildlife out.
We’ve utilised our pet dogs to detect truffles, and what we are asking our dogs to do is,
firstly on cue to work, so when they are not cued they are relaxed and in an off switch
position. And then when we cue them to work, they’ll
move ahead and hunt for truffle. When they find it there maybe a bit of scratching
around superficially, but they should give us a passive alert which is a drop, with nose
to target. The truffle is the target.
For me personally, I love the partnership. I love to work with my dog and have them work
for me and bond with me. We both love the aroma of the truffle, to
find a truffle, the scent of the soil. We’ll get down and we’;ll have a sniff
as well as the dog to define the ripeness and so on.
I actually don’t like truffles a whole lot, which is probably fortunate.
There’s lot of things that we don’t know, and I think the fact that we’ve been able
to cultivate them shows that we can predict some things about their biology, and we can
understand somethings about them but there’s a lot about them that we really don’t know
yet. It’s actual soil temperature rather than
air temperature that effects truffles. So they like summer warmth, and they like
rain in autumn and late summer and they need to have frosts to have that really beautiful
mature aroma. The truffle has a slow slow growing period
probably from around spring or summer, there is different evidence for that, and then it
matures quickly as the frosts come in and the temperature drops in the winter and autumn.
The start of the season, before the lockdown came into effect, we were selling most of
our product to Sydney. We had a large number of products going through
to a couple of customers they would be buying 2 to 3 kilos each week.
Then, as soon as lockdown impacted, our market got hit dramatically, both with our hunts
that we had to cancel, as well as with our product sales.
But, we’ve been able to pivot that and we’ve been able to sell that now to a lot of the
home cooks that are in lockdown and still want to have that delicacy, so the last few
weeks we’ve been boxing up thirty to forty boxes of truffles, induvial truffles at 20
to 30 grams and upwards and sending them off throughout the state.
And we were fortunate. We have a very long subscriber list and a
lot of followers, We put out one email and that lasted us for
three to four weeks of supply. S,o we couldn’t keep up with the demand.
Once the trees are planted they will take anywhere from five to seven years to start
producing, so it’s not a get rich quick scheme, I don’t even know if it’s about
getting rich, it’s more of a passion. You can run your dogs over and not find anything.
The rows that we’ve got closet to use here are summer truffle.
They produced the first-time last year, so that’s after fifteen years they’ve produced
their forts truffles. So, it’s a long-term return for that and…
it’s more of a passion.