Expert Advice: Foraging for Ramps

Photograph by Marie Viljoen

Here's something to look forward to during this long winter: join us for a woodland immersion, a lesson in foraging ramps sustainably, a guide to buying ramps, and encouragement to grow your own. Forest-farming and buying and selling ramp leaves only can help conserve this native resource.

Ramps (also called leeks and wild onions) grow in deciduous hardwood forests in the eastern United States and Canada. They appear in early spring along with ferns and ephemeral wildflowers, which are called ephemeral for a reason: Their season is very short.

For many people, ramps (Allium tricoccum and subspecies) are the only wild food they will eat. 

These native American onions are sold whole—roots, bulb, and leaves— in bunches at springtime farmers’ markets and in tangled, choose-your-own heaps at supermarkets.

Photograph by Edwina von Gal

These indigenous species have a limited time to form blooms, attract pollinators, set seed, and disperse that seed before becoming summer-dormant.

When ramps are collected en masse for market, other species are vulnerable. Think of them as collateral damage.

As well as growing from seed, ramps reproduce vegetatively, which is why you find them in familial clumps, with smaller bulbs around the most mature ones.

New bulbils develop from root-like stolons that connect the clumps beneath the soil. Removing an entire clump with roots attached destroys this method of regeneration.

The ideal way to pick ramps is to cut leaves from a single plant in a clump or to collect one leaf from a plant (leaving the other leaf to keep feeding the bulb).

A long-term, sustainable way to enjoy ramps is to grow them at home or to forest-farm them for sale. At home, you can plant purchased ramps with roots after soaking them overnight in water.

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Photograph by Edwina von Gal