Reading the Forest Floor
· Charles Lefevre
People expect the hunt to start with the dogs. It starts about twenty minutes earlier, standing at the edge of a stand of Douglas fir, working out whether it is worth letting them out of the van at all.
Age of the stand
Oregon truffles want young trees. Fifteen to thirty years is the window most of our good patches sit in — old enough that the root system is doing real work, young enough that the canopy still lets something through. A plantation that has gone past forty is usually finished for our purposes, whatever it looked like a decade ago.
Where the water goes
Truffles will not sit in standing water and they will not sit in dust. What you are looking for is a slope that drains but holds — the shoulder of a hill rather than the top or the bottom of it.
Every good patch has a story and a name. Most of them are named after whoever fell over in them first.
The duff layer
Pull back the needles. You want a few centimetres of loose, dark, crumbly duff over mineral soil. If the needle layer is thick and matted and has not broken down, the fungal activity underneath is usually poor.
None of this replaces a dog. It just means that by the time Dante is out and working, we have already decided the ground deserves him.