I’ve added another two trees to my list of producing ones today, bringing the total to 23/582 confirmed to have produced truffle. Unfortunately both were rotten, with an interior grey color inside showing they never ripened at all.
A 60g truffle rotten is bad news, but the second one was around 300grams. Thats around 3 rotten ones i’ve found of that size this season, and ripe ones have all been < 150grams.
I need to tally up the production, but its roughly half the truffle found to date has been either damaged, destroyed by insects etc, or outright rotten. It is possible the rotten count is far higher as Bear does not react to rotted truffles, whereas other dogs have marked quite a few sites that had no discernible smell. As a couple of those have since revealed rotted truffle, I’ll need to investigate the other marked sites for the same. At least I’ll know the trees are producing truffle in that instance.
Then the question needing answering is the causes of the rot. Some I can see being due to damage from drying out of near surface truffle, which then becoming infected, but the deeper ones I am not so sure. I have seen rotted truffle near and below partly damaged surface ones, and suspect they were responsible for culturing bacteria to infect the deeper ones. Hopefully its a seasonal thing, but I have too little data available to draw any conclusions on that yet.