Near the banks of the Delaware River in northeast Pennsylvania, Steven Schwartz, his silver hair tied back beneath his hat, is searching for a seed. It’s ramp season, and finding one of the tiny black pellets is like searching for a needle in an endless green haystack. For a ramp farmer like Schwartz, the seeds are a critical indicator that the population is healthy and multiplying.
At 71, Schwartz has learned plenty about these wild alliums since he moved here in 2006—and he’s eager to share.
In early May, the woods all around him are carpeted with lush green ramp leaves, clumped so tightly together it’s hard to tell one plant from the next. At last, he finds what he’s been looking for and takes a seat on a fallen log. As a woodpecker hammers in the distance, he picks up a dried seed head, left over from last year.
“This,” he said, “is what it’s all about.”
Flavor From the Woods
The ramp, a spring ephemeral that has become the most popular of dozens of wild alliums native to North America, grows across the Midwest and Eastern United States, particularly in the Great Lakes region and throughout the Appalachian range. Similar plants can be found in deciduous temperate forests around the world, including in Europe and East Asia, where the victory onion and Siberian onion, respectively, prosper. Other cousins flourish in the western U.S., especially the Pacific Northwest, including Brandegee’s onion and the swamp onion. But none have developed the ramp’s reputation as a beacon of spring.
Within their fleeting window of availability, foragers and consumers prize ramps for pickling, grilling, pesto, or any adventurous way to enjoy their gentle bite. Here in Pennsylvania, their leaves peek out in April, and by late May they have begun to deteriorate, turning yellow and dying back to make way for a flower stalk. In some regions, the season can stretch to June. The early summer blooms develop seeds by the end of the summer, which eventually fall to the ground as one of the plant’s two modes of reproduction, the other being bulb division.
“It’s the test of the hypothesis that you can eat your ramp and plant it, too. And it looks like it’ll work.”
Every spring, dozens of visitors come to Delaware Valley Ramps, Schwartz’s wooded 20-acre property in Equinunk, to pick the glossy, garlicky greens that are the first to emerge after winter’s thaw. Schwartz offers his wisdom on respectful harvesting to visitors who pay $65 to pick ramps for two hours. He asks them to take only those with three leaves, which are more mature than those with one or two, so they all have a chance to reproduce before they’re picked. He waits until later in the season to allow harvesting, because larger plants require fewer to make a pound, leaving more in the ground to sustain the patch. He also urges visitors to take only one from each clump so that none is overburdened, and he rotates through several patches to keep them all thriving.
It’s the least he can do to protect the population he found in abundance on his property when he bought it, lured by the Delaware River’s revered wild trout fishery. Although his land has no shortage of ramps, their future elsewhere is under pressure. In the early 1990s, after Martha Stewart first sang their praises and fine-dining chefs began putting ramps on seasonal spring menus, demand soared, especially in urban centers where they often sell for $25 per pound or more. Eager foragers fanned out into the woods, and it wasn’t long before concerns grew about population decline.
The whole plant is delicious, but every bulb removed from the earth is one less to sustain the wild population. For years, conservationists have worried that avid harvesting of bulbs will endanger a plant whose value is as much cultural as it is commercial. In both Indigenous and Appalachian communities, ramps are celebrated as a sign of spring with medicinal properties that can revive the spirit after a long, hard winter. Horticulturalists and ramp enthusiasts are working to better understand where and why they flourish and how humans can encourage their proliferation before it’s too late.
Can Ramps Be Farmed?
For more than a decade, Schwartz’s land has been a “living laboratory” for research conducted by Eric Burkhart, an ethnobotany and agroforestry teaching professor at the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, where he studies the conservation and management of forest products. His conclusions are in a paper, published last fall in the journal Wild, about the habitats most favorable for ramps: rich, deep soil on north- and east-facing slopes, with an abundance of sugar maple or bitternut hickory nearby to supply calcium and moisture for growth—much like Schwartz’s land along the Delaware River.
Although ramps grow wild, they’re often tended by property owners and harvesters, like Schwartz, who practice forest farming, which Burkhart describes as the cultivation and management of non-timber products under a forest canopy. Ramps and other forest foods are “the crack people can look through to get excited about their forests, rather than just seeing them as a source of timber revenue,” he said. And unlike most forest products, consumers already crave ramps, so expanding their supply can help harvesters meet demand while ensuring the plant population isn’t depleted.
Steven Schwartz takes notes while observing the characteristics of ramps growing in one of six test plots. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
Schwartz’s land is a suitable place to explore the potential of forest farming, because his methods are clearly working: his “living laboratory” now produces more ramps than ever. He’s seeing new patches flourishing on the property where none had grown before, which means their range is expanding, possibly due to the seeds being dispersed more widely by turkeys and other wildlife.
Today, his property includes a half-dozen 6-by-8-foot plots dedicated to studying whether ramps can be successfully regrown after they’re harvested by replanting the base of their bulbs. The study, designed and run by Schwartz in collaboration with Burkhart and still funded by a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education producer grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, aims to help balance productive yields with long-term conservation.
“It’s the test of the hypothesis that you can eat your ramp and plant it, too,” Schwartz said as he surveyed the ramps in one of the study plots. “And it looks like it’ll work.”
Rooted in Culture
Ramps have long been an important wild food for Indigenous cultures, often consumed therapeutically to treat colds, earaches, and infections. They are welcomed as the first green vegetable in the spring to replenish vitamins and nutrients after a winter of dried and preserved foods.
Karelle Hall, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a member of the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware, visited Schwartz’s property this spring as part of a broader effort to relearn ancestral traditions and get more people in her community to engage with ramps and other culturally significant foods, she said. A cousin who joined her that day operates the Native Roots Farm Foundation, focused on reconnecting Indigenous communities with their plant relatives.
Although she’d purchased them before at farmers’ markets, it was Hall’s first time harvesting ramps herself. It felt particularly significant to do so right beside the headwaters of the Delaware River, which supported the Nanticoke and Lenape tribes in pre-colonial times, she said. With her harvest, she made soups and stews, ramp butter to eat with a venison roast, and ramp salt that she’ll share with relatives to strengthen her community’s connection to the plant.
