Throughout the United States and Canada, the American Truffle Company (ATC- our operation in North America) has been planting orchards in partnership. Thousands of oak and filbert seedlings have just been planted in our newest orchard in North Carolina, complete with a fantastic professionally-installed irrigation system. The scientific methodology, close care and diligence that went into growing and planting the seedlings is paying off – all are doing very well in their new environment.

Within the UK: this month the Forestry Commission officially open their grant applications for the establishment of native woodland (new woodland creation grant) which significantly off-sets the costs of establishing your truffle orchard. Most areas of the UK are suitable and through the partnership approach we help you every step of the way, including planting plans and grant applications.

We are delighted to announce that we’ve been joined by Isianne Neve. Issi is intrigued by truffle cultivation, has a strong interest in plants and ecology and will be helping manage our databases and pushing our research forward. Issi is also likely to be one of the first people you speak to when calling- office hours for telephone calls are 9am-1pm (GMT) Monday-Friday and the contact number is +44(0)1433 659167.

Here at Mycorrhizal Systems, we love trees. No really, we do… without trees, where would we collect all the truffles?

Just before Christmas we held an open day for the Chefs’ Guild at the truffle-dog training-school in Hampshire. The event was a huge success with talks on the range and diversity of truffle species, truffle cultivation with microscope demonstrations, a fantastic truffle lunch and truffle-training/hunting demonstrations. Mufti, Marion’s prized truffle hound, was really the star of the day. Jose Suter (of the chefs’ guild)  said “This has been an absolutely fascinating and fun day, we can’t wait to come back!”.

Just before Christmas we held an open day for the Chefs’ Guild at the truffle-dog training-school in Hampshire. The event was a huge success with talks on the range and diversity of truffle species, truffle cultivation with microscope demonstrations, a fantastic truffle lunch and truffle-training/hunting demonstrations. Mufti, Marion’s prized truffle hound, was really the star of the day. Jose Suter (of the chefs’ guild)  said “This has been an absolutely fascinating and fun day, we can’t wait to come back!”.

Recently, you may have seen several media articles claiming that a new project is being launched in France to clone the black truffle (Tuber melanosporum).  These articles made headlines around the world and led to claims that truffle production will increase with scientists cloning truffles and trees. In fact, such experimentation is not new and has been the source of many projects for at least the past 20 years. Several studies have focused on truffle-strain selection as well as selecting and cloning well-performing host trees.

The dates of the next International Workshop on Edible Mycorrhiza Mushrooms (IWEMM6) have just been released and our very own Dr Paul Thomas will be sitting on the international scientific committee.

In early November 08 we started to collate results from our Welsh plantation, where we are seeing excellent brûlé development (burnt areas around the tree base caused by the truffle growth) just 9 – 12 months after planting. We recorded data from 77 trees and only seven were not yet showing signs of brûlé development. This is really good news as we were not expecting such good development for at least two more years. We are now planning a full vegetation survey across the site as well as biological soil measurements to see what is happening below ground.