I should be so lucky (lucky, lucky, lucky)

I have a Google News Alert set to email me whenever something truffle-like pops up on the net. Ninety percent of the time it’s stuffed with restaurant reviews where ambitious chefs are overusing wholly artificial truffle oils to be trendy, or chocolate is involved, but sometimes it comes with a gem like this one from the BBC. Not only does it feature an English village straight out of Miss Marple or Midsomer Murders – Little Bedwyn – but it reports the finding of 10kg of summer truffles (Tuber aestivum) on one farm.

Not much time for musings on this – too many bills to pay – but I rather hope my T uncinatum are as prolific…

The (late) Truffle Book

The Truffle Book is a work in progress. Very slow progress. I’m writing this entry as a warm-up to writing about the chemical constituents of truffle aroma, about half way through chapter three. If I make any serious inroads on that chapter, then the word count in the column on the right will ratchet up a little more. This blog is a way of publicly committing myself to getting the thing written and published, and as long as blogging doesn’t replace real work, we’ll be OK. I hope.
In 1999 I wrote The Olive Book, intended as a guide to growing olives in the southern hemisphere. It was the book I’d wanted to read when establishing the olive grove at Limestone Hills, and because olive growing has become fashionable in Australia and New Zealand, it’s sold reasonably well. We’re not talking big numbers here, because there aren’t that many olive growers around, but I still get an occasional royalty cheque.

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Things to do with a truffle #1

Let us suppose you are fortunate enough to get your hands on a truffle. A lovely fresh Perigord black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) of decent size. It doesn’t need to be large if it’s a good one — and with this season’s NZ selling price steady at NZ$3,750/kg (roughly E2,000/kg or US$1,100/lb), it’s unlikely to be a very big one, at least for personal use. I emphasise the words “good” and “fresh”. It is possible to spend a lot of money on little jars of preserved truffle, but though they have a role in cuisine, their flavour is a pale shadow of the fresh truffle. Many of those jars also contain truffles other than the echt melanosporum, but you might need a magnifying glass to discover that from the label.

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Chemistry lessons

I don’t like using “chemicals” on the farm. I’m sometimes asked if we farm organically (as our neighbours do, with their cute little Dorper lambs gambolling around at the moment), and I usually reply “nearly”. Organic except for Roundup. Roundup is brand name for glyphosate, a weedkiller that is supposed to be one of the least harmful to the environment. It doesn’t hang around in the soil for long, and is very effective. We used it to keep the soil around our trees free of weeds, so that the little plants could grow without competition from grass and stuff. It makes a big difference to their rate of growth. Now they’re big enough to look after themselves, our usage has gone down markedly. Last year, I hardly used any at all.

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On the grass again

It’s started again, as I said it would. The grass is growing, and we have rather a lot of it. It takes about three hours on our Stiga mower to do the garden lawns. When the olive grove, vineyard and truffière need doing, you can bank on spending a day puffing around on our little Japanese ex-rice paddy tractor with its “slasher” on the back. In spring, warming soil temperatures and plenty of soil moisture mean that you can watch the grass growing and not get bored.

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Technolust

When can I start the justification process for a G5 PowerBook?

I do all my non-farm work (and the farm accounts) on a four year old Apple PowerBook G3 (Firewire), known to its friends (and there are many) as a Pismo PowerBook. I bought it in September 2000, just in time for my truffle research trip through France and Italy, and it’s since bumped along with me to the USA, Argentina, Britain and Australia. About a year ago it began to feel rather slow. It wasn’t new anymore. The PowerBooks in Magnum Mac looked shinier and sleeker and faster. The sluggishness was partly because I insist on using the latest iteration of Mac OS X, and partly because I was converting to digital photography and doing more work in Photoshop and InDesign – getting ready for the production of The Truffle Book. I began to feel that “time for an upgrade” itch.

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On The Farm Starts Here

First entry in my first farm blog. I have a dim idea of what it will be about. There will be stuff about what’s happening on the farm: pruning, planting, digging, truffle hunting, pressing or picking — whatever I happen to find interesting at the time. I may also wish to wax lyrical (first cliché – someone keep count, please) about the music I’m listening to or the books I’m reading, and if I’m not very careful, I may offer comments on local and world events. And pictures too. You can get all the background to who I am on the main Limestone Hills website (when it’s finished), but for the time being consider me a middle-aged man with some minor (in my opinion) obsessions: fungi, music, books, writing.

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The Mediterranean lifestyle

The Mediterranean lifestyle, or growing olives, grapes, truffles and things that taste nice in salads… [First published in Growing Today in 2001 – I think].

All things Mediterranean are deemed to be fashionable. The Mediterranean diet cures us of heart disease and lengthens our lives. A Mediterranean lifestyle is something we aspire to. But the Mediterranean is just a smallish sea between Europe and Africa. What people are really talking about is a lifestyle loosely based on the lives and eating habits of peasants on the north coast of “the Med”. You don’t hear too many people waxing lyrical about emulating the Libyan or Tunisian lifestyle. From Spain in the West to Greece and Turkey in the East, the various cultures have developed diets based on using large quantities of olive oil, fresh vegetables, fish and the unstinting consumption of wine. For modern New Zealanders (and many in Australia and the USA), that sounds like a pretty good life. Couple that with warm fuzzy memories of the European leg of your last overseas trip, or that Tuscan or Provençal holiday, and you have the motivation to set about turning your chunk of land into something a little more romantic.

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The answer lies in the soil

This was first published by Growing Today in 2003.

A long time ago, in a garden far, far away, I made an attempt to understand “ soil”. I read gardening books, watched TV gardeners, let the dry crumbly stuff run through my fingers, and then gave up — snowed under by the welter of technical terms, detailed classifications and chemistry that had me struggling to remember the stuff I’d learned at school. “Soil” was filed under T for Too Difficult, and I concentrated on just growing things. Luckily, my living did not depend on the results.

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