WOODFORD TRUFFLES SA

Is your Area Cold Enough ?
The most important step is to establish if you have the right cold units. We need 800 cold units for truffles to be successfully propagated in your area.

Your day and night average winter temperature needs to be about 8° degrees. Lower temps are OK but higher temps are not ideal and would have to be tempered by mulching.

By sending us your GPS co-ordinates, we can check your areas Cold Units.

Site Establishment
Your site selection is the second most important step toward successful truffle production, a well drained soil is very important.

Take sun, wind direction and water availability into consideration when choosing a site.

The French black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) needs a climate without extreme summer heat or extreme winter cold. Mulching and irrigation methods can modify conditions and make marginal areas suitable for truffle growing.

The French Black Truffle tolerates a broad range of soils from sandy to clay loams, including rocky soils, but most importantly, truffles require well-drained soils.

Woodford truffles team of experts will work together with you to confirm the most suitable site.

 A Truffle Gerfuffel !  The Black Perigord Truffle is the legendary culinary black diamond of the kitchen – Tuber melanosporum – we have long read about in European magazines and associate it with the good life of champagne, caviar and a luxe lifestyle. Ah, the good life!

Volker Miros, is the Truffle Guru of SA, his interest in mushrooms at a very early age when mushroom hunting with his grandfather in the forests of around Stuttgart, Germany. Later in life, Volker’s interest in food steered him to become a prominent Food Photographer.

First, a confession: I am a mycophile at heart. As a young boy in Germany, my grandfather trained me to search for wild mushrooms in the forest. The splendid mushrooms we found were then served at our Sunday lunch. This fondest of childhood memories left an indelible, aromatic impression on me. I tried to grow boletus mushrooms for years in South Africa and never succeeded. I am a South African farmer, so failure was not an option but a challenge. 

While researching our book, Kukumakranka, co-authored with Renata Coetzeé, I learned about the Khoi-Khoi culinary tradition of searching for and collecting the white Kalahari truffle, known as the “t-nabba”. Writing about the Khoisan lifestyle, what they ate and how they lived,  we found that truffles where a protein source for the Khoi-Khoin and were found mostly in the Kalahari. A wild truffle variety had then recently been found in South Africa for the first time on the chalk downs of the Southern Cape, assuring our scientists that truffles could be cultivated here.  

Over the last 12 years Volker acquired a vast knowledge and experience of world truffle cultivation. When wild truffles were recently found in South Africa for the first time on the chalk downs of the Southern Cape, it assured our scientists that truffles can be cultivated here,  Volker had already set out and assembled a team of experts to launch commercial truffle cultivation in Southern Africa on a large scale.

The Woodford team of mycologists, agriculturists, horticulturists and scientists are in a position to apply the technology to establish Joint Venture truffle orchards, and will support in all aspects of setting up and assisting the grower in managing the orchard and finaly moving the product to market.  If you have land and are interested in cultivating Black Perigord Truffles, send us your GPS co-ordinates and we will ascertain if your site has enough ‘Cold Units’. Once your orchard is setup, our specialists will visit your orchard to monitor the progress of the saplings and the truffle mycorrhiza.

Woodford Truffles SA (Pty) Limited, offers participation in the form of a Joint Venture Partnership, where-in the Landowner is the grower, and the Woodford Team supply the Truffle “inoculated” trees, and monitor the mycorrhizal progress on the tree roots.   Woodford Truffles SA have an established distribution network for the sale of the Truffle harvests on the local and international markets.