Tripping over truffles in Leicester
The site – 1 Ha worth of truffle inoculated trees were planted in 2008 and produced the first cultivated UK truffle in 2015. The site is a beautiful woodland environment and was very well maintained to allow easy access for hunting.
Results so far - The bulk of the harvesting was done by eye last season, by raking back the leaf litter to uncover developing truffles. This isn’t the normal method of finding truffles as many deeper truffles will go unnoticed, but large quantities have been recovered. Further, raking of the soil can cause damage to the fruiting bodies, so we would not recommend this approach.
Outlook – this year’s harvesting plan is to have dogs on site to hunt on a regular basis, this will help pinpoint the truffles that are ready to sell and allow the truffles that are not ready, time to mature and be harvested on the next visit. Production is already high, and we expect this new harvesting system to produce much larger yields this coming season.
Contact us
If you have a site that you’d like to use for truffle cultivation, please contact us, and we can talk you through what conditions are needed, before assessing your site to check for suitability. We will help guide you at every step of the way!