Carolina Alumni Review - July/August 2014

26 July/August 2014

GROW, LIT TLE TREE, GROW cuisine, each prepared by a different Michelin-star chef. In more ways than miles, Napa was a long, long way from the cold, muddy field I’d planted with spaghetti trees.

Seated across the table from us was a charming woman in her 80s, wearing a gorgeous royal blue sequined gown and dripping with diamonds. Someone whispered that our dinner companion was Margrit Mondavi, the widow of Robert Mondavi, founder of the billion-dollar winery that bears his name. Not forgetting my Southern manners, I walked around and knelt down beside her chair to introduce myself.

“You look lovely,” I added. “What a
beautiful gown.”
“Well,” she warbled in a lilting Swiss
accent, “we must honor the truffles!”
A few months after planting my truffle
orchard, when I returned to North Car-
olina to check on my baby trees, I found
them not merely alive, but leafed out, green
and growing! I was thrilled. If all contin-
ued to go well, in five to seven years, just
about the time Bob hoped to retire, the
truffle fungus should mature enough to
fruit, yielding the pungent brown blobs that
command so much reverence — and such
high prices — in the culinary world.

In the meantime, I’d need to be diligent
in maintaining my orchard. So I found
someone to mow the grass, weed around
the trees and monitor the irrigation sys-
tem. I had plastic tubes placed around each
seedling to deter hungry rabbits and a deer
fence installed around the entire orchard to
protect tender leaves and shoots once they
topped the tubes.

I thought I’d covered all the bases, done my research, partnered with professionals, followed their every recommendation. But I’d never suspected that my entire enterprise could be undone by a burgeoning population of tiny ravenous rodents.

I didn’t sleep that night of the voles. I didn’t catch my flight the next morning either. Instead I drove back to the farm, walked each orchard row and tugged on each individual tree, hundreds and hundreds of them. All told, I’d lost only 50. Thank God. I called my orchard manager, and we devised a serious vole eradication plan. Crisis averted.

Each season since has brought new challenges. Runaway ragweed. Broken irrigation lines. Leaf-eating bugs. Powdery mildew. Not to mention reports of filbert blight and feral hogs elsewhere in the state.

Agriculture is risky.

But five years into my truffle adventure, nearly all of my trees have continued to thrive. They tower over me now, their branches reaching high into that Carolina blue sky, their roots, thick with truffle fungus, spidered deep into the red clay soil of Grandpa’s old tobacco field.

It’s time. This is the summer we’ve been waiting for, the first summer we can legitimately hope to harvest truffles. I have a trained dog standing by to sniff them out. (Pigs are so 19th century.) Chefs in Charlotte and San Diego are sharpening their truffle slicers. And Bob is on target to retire next year.

Agriculture is risky.

Truffle cultivation, while well established in Europe and Australia, is still a largely unproven business here in the States. There’s never been any guarantee that I could grow summer truffles in North Carolina. But I believe. I have always believed.

Come on, baby trees, I’m betting on you.

Sandra Millers Younger ’ 75 is an award-winning magazine journalist and founder of and master story strategist at Strategic Story Solutions. She’s also the author of The Fire Outside My Window: A Survivor Tells the True Story of California’s Epic Cedar Fire. A Phi Beta Kappa journalism graduate of Carolina, she also earned a master’s degree in magazine journalism at Syracuse University, where she studied on a Syracuse Graduate Fellowship. She and her husband, Bob, moved to San Diego in 1982. For the past 10 years, they have lived in Wildcat Canyon, the area worst hit by the Cedar Fire. For more, go to www.sandramillersyounger.com.

Agriculture is risky. But five years into my truffle adventure,
nearly all of my trees have continued to thrive. They tower
over me now, their branches reaching high into that Carolina
blue sky, their roots, thick with truffle fungus, spidered deep
into the red clay soil of Grandpa’s old tobacco field.