How to Harvest Wild Ramps Sustainably

Video Transcript

(00:03):

Hello. My name's Christopher Parker, Kat and I are on our property here in Western North Carolina. We call it the Forest Farmacy. And what we do here is a lot of mushrooms, a lot of education and a lot of forest medicinals. So forest farming, that sort of thing. So today I want to talk to you a little bit about ramps. This whole ramp craze has gotten pretty hot and heavy in the last 15 or 20 years. Every body wants some, hipsters want to have 'em on toast. All the chefs want 'em and they don't care how they get them. And so what we're gonna talk about today is sustainable harvesting of ramps. And a lot of people wanna push back on that and say, you know, my family's been, you know, here in West Virginia, or here in Western North Carolina, or here in the mountains of, you know, Virginia, wherever they are talking about harvesting ramps, the way that their grandfather did it.

(01:17):

My family's been here for generations and the other half of family has been here for thousands of generations. , And the forests have been taken care of, and they've been harvested sustainably for a very long time. So what's in this box, here is 80 bundles of ramps, just like this. A friend of mine purchased those. And I purchased these from her, in the efforts to replant them here, back on the property and they dug,, other things like here's a, here's a Trout Lily in there, and this is the perfect example of how not to harvest ramps. You know, fortunately they didn't harvest all of them like this and bang them up. They got a lot of the roots. These have been harvested for about 24 hours. But the, the proper way to harvest ramps is to either take a leaf or take the very top, leave the bulb intact and don't do it every year.

(02:34):

My grandfather actually told me the way to harvest ramps was to never harvest out of a patch that, say three feet in diameter. If you're gonna harvest out of, out of a patch, make sure it's a lot larger than that. And then he said to take a hoe and just go through the very center of the patch and it's okay to dig up even the roots that way, because what's gonna happen is those seeds that year will fill back in those areas. And ramps from seed, will take about seven years approximately before they're ready to harvest. You could harvest them before that, but, most of the time just don't take the root, cut it down here, or take one, one leaf, uh, because they are very over harvested. So they're very over, over harvested. And what we're gonna do here today is we're gonna replant all of these ramps that still have the leaves, the ones like this, we will eat 90% of these bunches.

(03:41):

You know, there may be like a couple in each bunch that does not have the roots attached. So we're gonna replant these, and these may not produce seed because of the shock of being transplanted this year. But next year, these bigger ones will produce seed and we will harvest those seed. We'll either distribute those amongst other people, or we will continue to plant more ramp patches. So with that being said, we're gonna talk about site selection just a little bit. Where we are here. You can kind of see behind me it's pretty steep. It's a really rich cove, it's by the creek. You can see, tooth wort, which is also another fantastic edible. I probably shouldn't say that though becasue people start harvesting it. There's other indicators like, Wood Nettles that's coming up in the forest.

(04:36):

A lot of people are all about Stinging Nettles, which is not a native, but the Wood Nettle is a native and the Wood Nettle is my favorite. It doesn't sting quite as much as the Stinging Nettle. I can harvest it, um, with just my bare hands. It's all about how you handle it and how you communicate with the plant. So the Wood Nettles typically are good indicator that there's a lot of, there's a lot of richness to the soil. So there's usually a lot of top soil, or at least in a lot of nutrients there. So yeah, so what we're going to do with the ramps, like the ones that are really young, like this have just emerged, I'll just transplant this straight into the, straight into the soil. Some of these like this one, which is a big one, it's got three big leaves.

(05:29):

Uh, I'll snap off that dead leaf before I transplant it. And I'll probably also trim the top part of the leaves. Because with that transplant shock what's gonna have happen is it's gonna try to supply nutrients to the whole leaf. If you cut that off just a little bit, that's still gonna allow it to have photosynthesis and rebound when it gets transplanted and the leaves are gonna continue to stay wrecked. If the, if there's big leaves and you're transplanting them, they potentially would fall over. It may not be as effective at, transporting nutrients. And also, um, this one has a tiny root, so there's just barely a root left, it'll it will survive, but it's not ideal. So don't take the, don't take the previous years, dead growth off there, leave that intact. It kind of protects it and also as it decays, it will also provide nutrients and a lot of microbes in the soil will feed on this and that... then the plant therefore will feed on their dead bodies and their frass or either, mycorrhizal connections that, that happen with that. So basically all you're gonna wanna do is take your trowel or dig with your hands, whatever, dig a small, small little divot, plant it back up to about where it came outta the soil, best case scenario.

(07:08):

And that's pretty much it, if you can do it right before it rains, unless you have a lot of water available, if you're, you know, if you have a small, lot in the, you know, close to the city or you just have a small woodland lot, u and you have access to water, water it, but the soil here just rained yesterday. So the soil's really moist and it's not gonna dry out this area. Doesn't really get a lot of sun it's pretty dark, and it gets limited amount of sun even this time of year. So we're like, the very first part of April, I think, right? Yeah, yeah. The first part of April! So yeah, and that's just about it. So we're gonna be plugging away, planting all these ramps. I got 80 bundles in here and there's probably at least seven, eight, ramp, individual bulbs. ... So it's gonna be a lot of ramps. So I'm excited to get a hold of this, but do, unless you're gonna replant 'em do not support people who dig ramps like this.