Cool article about a group of people who seem to have made a breakthrough. Previous to them the largest producing farm in North America was 25 lbs at Kendall Jackson.
I went ahead and placed some futures just for the heck of it.
There is also something called a Pecan Truffle that grows on the roots of pecan trees. I’ve always wanted to bring a dog out to the farm to see if we can find any.
Interesting to me that North Carolina is ground zero for a lot of this. This guy is 30 minutes from us and is a leader in the trade association mentioned in the article, http://www.garlandtruffles.com, although he works with tuber melanosporum. I wonder if I may have seen some of the early efforts with bianchetto years ago.
I also asked about growing trees in my zone and this was the response. Still thinking about maybe 2? Just for the heck of it…
Thank you very much for contacting us! We would be happy to help you. Experiments like this are fun, and we’d love to know how it turns out.
One tree can theoretically produce truffles. But truffles form where fungal threads come together, so groupings of trees make truffles more likely.
To have the best chance of success, I’d recommend liming your soil to get close to the 7.2-7.5 range. This will take quite a bit of lime in most places, especially if you’re working with more clay. Calcitic lime is ideal if you have access to it. Otherwise, if your soil can simply keep trees alive, then do not add any more of the traditional fertilizer components (N, P, K, etc.).
Here are our tree prices: $100 each for 1-24 trees, $75 each for 25-49 trees, $50 each for 50-99 trees, etc. For reference, we plant them 8-10 feet apart. If you are purchasing under 25 trees, you can purchase them on our website at www.burwellfarmsnc.com/shop-products.
We believe that Bianchettos are the future of truffle-growing. You can read five reasons why on our website here: https://www.burwellfarmsnc.com/trees.
Please let me know how we can help you further. My cell phone number is…
For truffles like Perigord, along a relatively narrow band from North Carolina west towards Tennessee and possibly Southern/South Eastern Missouri, if I remember correctly, from when I was toying with idea of establishing a truffle farm 12 years ago. I don’t think Alba truffles have ever been grown in the US.
Though it’s possible that since I was last paying attention there have been some breakthroughs. Note also I’m not referring to summer truffles grown in the pacific NW