Truffle Trees for Sale: Black Truffle Plants from Spain

Truffle trees for sale here are host trees inoculated with black truffle, Tuber melanosporum, from the Spanish nurseries a grower trusts.

The order is sized by surface, not by pot: at the density the grower uses, a hectare takes 300 plants.

This page explains how an order is placed and what to check before paying anyone for a truffle tree.

What is for sale, and what is not

What is sold is the plant: a young host tree with black truffle on its roots, from a nursery that checks each batch.

What is not sold is a promise of harvest. The grower is clear that some plantations never produce because something after planting was done wrong or a detail was missed. The plant is the start of the work, not the end of it.

Sizing the order: plant the surface, not the estate

Start from the surface you will actually plant this coming season. At 300 trees per hectare, forty hectares comes to about 12,000 plants.

Ordering for the whole estate at once is the common mistake. A plant that waits a year in a pot is a plant that has lost a year.

What to check before buying truffle trees anywhere

Truffle growing is a hermetic sector, in the grower’s own word, so what you can check matters more than what you are told. He looks at experience, at professionalism, and at whether the nursery takes responsibility when a batch is wrong.

Whoever you buy from, settle four things in writing before you pay.

• The analysis: plants sent to an outside laboratory that specialises in truffle growing, commissioned by you, not by the nursery.
• The threshold: a minimum of around 33 per cent Tuber melanosporum, ideally 55 to 70, with no mycorrhizas from other Tuber species.
• The replacement agreement: if the report says the batch is not fit to plant, the whole batch goes back with the report and is replaced with one that passes, at no extra cost.
• The species and the batch date: Tuber melanosporum by name, not just “truffle”, with the host species and the date the plants left the nursery.

Budget the analysis into the order

The laboratory report is the only document that says what is really on the roots, and it is paid for separately from the plants.

It runs at around 65 euros per plant analysed, with a minimum of five. The number analysed grows with the order: for a plantation of a thousand plants, about twelve. Spread over the order it is a small share of the total.

Order the plants well ahead of the planting season as well. Inoculated stock is raised to order, and the volume you want has to be reserved with the nursery in advance.

When the trees you buy now will produce

First truffles at five or six years, in token amounts. Commercial production from eight to ten years. The plantation starts to earn at ten to twelve, peaks between twelve and eighteen, and can produce until about thirty.

The grower calls it a very long-term investment, and a purchase of truffle trees should be judged on that timeline rather than on the price of a pot.

Related pages:

• Truffle Trees for Black Truffle (Tuber melanosporum)
• Inoculated Truffle Trees: How Black Truffle Mycorrhiza Works
• Truffle Seedlings for a Black Truffle Plantation
• Black Truffle Farming: What a Plantation Costs and Yields