The best time to get a truffle dog is not when you plant the truffle trees, but it's when you first find truffles. It can take between 3-6 years before you will find your first truffles and it takes 1 year with a truffle season and a professional truffle dog as a teacher to have a good truffle dog.

If you get your truffle dog when you plant your trees, your dog may be 5 years old by the time you have truffles. They will be 10 when you start producing a commercial crop. At that age they will be close to retirement when you need them the most. If you have a professional truffle dog confirm you have truffles between year 3-6, then this is the best time to get the dog. You will have an area to train on with real truffles marked out by your professional harvester. You will be able to train for accuracy as you know the truffles' exact location. When your crop quantity is really picking up, you will have a dog in their prime.

Another good reason to not have a dog those first 3 or so years is that those first few years are extremely important to nurture your truffiere and its fungus spores. Use that extra time you have to tend to your truffiere, as you are not looking after a high energy puppy. A lot of people assume you plant the trees and then have to wait 3-6 years for your first truffle. This is so totally incorrect. You don't wait 3-6 years, you nurture the trees and thus the truffle fungus in those years. Clearing weeds to keep competition for nutrients down to strengthen your fungus colonies, checking ph levels to ensure proper soil conditions. Some farms I have been to which started having strong brulee very early in their 3rd year were re-inoculating the soil with truffle spore before even having their first truffle. This ensured the soil had the many different mating types of truffle fungus to produce strong colonies and thus larger truffles. This pre truffle production time is extremely important if you want to have truffles at the earliest possible time.

A good idea is to get a second truffle dog 2-3 years after you first produce, so you have two dogs at different ages. When your first dog is starting to slow down, you have the second dog who is in their prime. You will have the second dog when your production started really picking up and you can rotate the dogs. In addition, when you are training up your second dog, you have a seasoned truffle dog who has done 2-3 seasons who they can learn from.