Harvesting Wild Ramps in Appalachia

by Jennings Ingram, excursion led by Ryan Milt

RAMPS! These sought-after wild food icons are are all the rage in my small Appalachian mountain town right now. If you don’t know what ramps are, they’re a gourmet, delicately flavored, wild-growing leek/onion type plant that is both gorgeous and rare. They’re overharvested and protected in many areas. They’re also difficult to cultivate, making them an almost exclusively wild food.

Above: Ramps growing with wildflower Trillium

Though they can be elusive and often nearly extinct on public land, if you are committed to practicing sustainable harvesting & know the right people, friends can lead you to secluded, private places where ramps pretty much carpet the hillsides with lustrous shoots! I got to go on my first ramp hunting excursion this past weekend and it was...unforgettable. Both joyful and heartbreaking. Let’s focus on the joyful bounty of sustainable ramp harvesting in the Appalachian mountains first, yes?

Ryan Milt of Asheville Wild Foods @ashevillewildfoods, creator of the palate alchemy known as ramp salt
My guide was Ryan Milt of Asheville Wild Foods, a local, sustainably wildcrafted food & tincture company, who generously agreed to take me along on one of his first ramp voyages this season. We drove to a remote location, which I of course cannot divulge, but which didn’t seem particularly out of the ordinary to my untrained eye. We ditched the car and hiked for what felt like forever! (A few hours.) I was impressed that my guide did the entire hike - which was not without a healthy share of rocks - BAREFOOT! My phone registered us as climbing over 50 flights of stairs in just under 5 hours! Pretty sure most of us mortals would perish as bear food in the forest if we tried that sans shoes. (I definitely wore hiking boots.)

At first, the understory was mostly carpeted with other wild beauties like wild geranium, trillium, dutchman’s breeches, squirrel corn, toothwort, water leaf, angelica, and others we didn’t know. I didn’t recognize the ramps as ramps at first, because they were so sparse, just one or two, up to five here and there; I thought they were some sort of wild bulb he just wasn’t pointing out (which was true because ramps have bulbs!).

And then, we turned off the trail into the soft, leafy understory, following a small creek. Hushed nature noises closed in around us, and I swear I could feel the forest breathing. I felt we must be close!

It was somewhat shocking, then, when we came upon a strange sight: two men, red-faced, both with nothing but a large sack over each shoulder, puffing their way back down this sacred-feeling hill.
After feeling confused for a second, I then had a sinking suspicion that these might be the “take it all” type of harvesters I’d heard about, the kind that ripped up a whole patch and left the earth raw and hurting, with nothing to regenerate for future years. I felt uneasy, but shook it off. Maybe they were just camping… Ryan thought that might be the case as well, but we couldn’t know for sure. Plus, I was wildly happy to be ramp hunting, and these two weirdos weren’t going to ruin it for me!

After about ten minutes longer, we climbed a small, steep hill, and came upon our first ramp patch!! I was ecstatic; there must have been a few hundred plants growing there, all around us, and we sat down for Ryan to demonstrate to me how to sustainably harvest the leaves without damaging the plant. Cut only one leaf per plant, from the largest and healthiest plants only, and skip lots of plants in between the ones you harvest. Include the stem and don't bruise the stem or leaf!

Then, he stood me up and pointed me towards the adjoining hillsides… and my mouth FELL OPEN, y’all. I was so excited by the comparatively tiny patch we saw at first that I hadn’t realized the ramp-tastic context we were now in.
Because the whole mountainside? As far up, and as far out as I could see, was completely covered, CARPETED, in delicious wild ramps. More than we could harvest even if we came back every day for a month. MONTHS. It was one of the most abundant natural food sources I’ve ever seen.

We started trekking into this veritable food forest, harvesting sparsely from the largest plants as we went. I was over the moon! Appalachia has me falling in love over and over again, and I was swooning. When would this wild and wondrous land I’ve moved to ever stop completely flooring me with its complex ecological bounty? How could this be real?

It was blissful.


And then…..we found where the sack-wielders, and others like them, had been. Those who harvest with an appetite for an $18 per pound price tag and without ecological conscience.

Above line: Before people. Below line: After people.
The ground had been ripped open, intricate communities of non-rampy roots and rich forest soil left raw and naked to the air. For roots and soil that need to be knitted together in the moist, delicate webs they’ve constructed, this is like leaving someone to bleed out. Only, the forest is much larger and more resilient than the human body, so it’s more like a multi-handed creature having lots of its fingers chopped off and left bleeding. Not fatal, but hard to recover from, possibly introducing disease, and an overall blow to bodily health. A shitty thing to do, basically.

Rage and grief rose in me, and I nearly crushed the handful of ramp leaves I was holding without realizing it. It was shocking. Sickening. In a second, the context of all the horrors humans have imposed on this world came crashing back in. Childlike spell of discovery broken, I looked around with growing horror at the pitted scars of overharvested abuse and realized that this landscape was anything but protected from the patterns of violence echoed in human society. A microcosm of extractive domination happening right in front of my face! Ashamed, I realized that my own thought patterns had gone through the mentality of “inexhaustable abundance” that helped lead to this kind of extinction just minutes before. As I knelt to replace the leaf litter over broken soil and pick up Mountain Dew cans, I felt the deep illness of parasitic human presence our planet.

Why bring poison in a bottle to a place where the water is literally clean enough to drink? AND THEN LEAVE THE BOTTLE?
Ryan explained to me that everywhere we saw only a ramp or two remaining, the vast miles of understory we hiked to get here, were once as flush with ramps as the mountainsides that now surrounded us. It was ALL once this bountiful, and the sparsely ramped mountainsides on the hike out to this seemingly lush patch were a silent, screaming monument to human greed. This was one of those unbelievable truths that feels like a hard smack in the face.
It was hard to talk, then, for a little while.

On the way out, we ran into a mutual friend, an experienced sustainable wild foods harvester in our community. He and Ryan are the so-called local “Ramp Kings.” This friend prides himself on moving and harvesting so sensitively, and so sustainably, through the forest that it’s impossible to tell when he’s been through a patch, something we deeply appreciate. I couldn’t help but notice he didn’t look like he felt all that well. We didn’t speak long, but one of the first things he said to us was “Every time I come out here, a little piece of me dies.” Pain was in his eyes and in the twist of his body as he said it.

I was left with some delicious ramp leaves, the reeling feeling of rocketing to the top of an emotional rollercoaster and hitting the bottom within a few hours, and a sense of shame for humanity.

I don’t know how to make this better. How can we move away from dominating our environment into extinction? All I know is we have to try. Because the ramps? They need us.

Ramps: A Doomed and Dwindling Species?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Internet access is limited for me at the moment, but I will respond as quickly as I can! I care about you all and look forward to talking with everyone!

All images are originals taken by Jennings Ingram, please respect this and only reproduce with permission. Thank you.