Hang on, it’s going to get a little spicy around here.
It’s ramp season in Minnesota, and it’s been spring onion season in most of the country for a while now; it should continue into July in the mountains of the West. Ramps, wild onion, wild garlic, whatever you call them, are some of our best springtime wild foods. They get me excited.
But for some reason, onions — OK, let’s be honest, ramps, because no one seems to give a damn about any other of the more than 100 species of wild alliums that call North America home — are weirdly controversial in a way that is very American.
At its core is the idiotic notion that if some is good, more is better. This maxim, taken into the conservation context, has lead to some disasters (don’t get me started on swordfish!) — ramps high among them.
So. The flawed logic goes like this:
Ramps are slow growing.
Digging a ramp kills that plant.
Ramps are popular, so there’s a commerical incentive to overharvest.
Snipping off ramp leaves doesn’t kill the plant.
Ergo, only delicate snipping of a few leaves is morally acceptable. If even that.
The first bit is absolutely true. It can take a ramp six or more years to grow into a nice bulb from seed. The third is also true: Ramps are very popular, moreso than I’d like, and there is in fact a commercial incentive to overharvest. The fourth bit is true as well. Ramps are resilient.
The rest? Well… here we go.
Uprooting a ramp bulb kills that plant, yes, because you plan on eating it. But a couple things happen when you pull that bulb. First, chances are there’s a little bulblet alongside it, one too small to bother with. A great many wild onions do this. Maybe all of them. If you put that little bulblet where you took the big one, the little one will have a chance to grow big like its friend.
Second, a great many wild onions have what amounts to a breakaway root cluster on the bottom. Snap this off and replant and a whole new onion will grow.
So while yes, uprooting a ramp can kill the plant, it doesn’t have to, and even if it does, if you replace the bulblets, you’re in good shape.
And here’s the thing: Even if you don’t, the patch will be fine, if you do a few things. First, I like to take only really large onions. That practice by design 1) gives me big, awesome wild onions, and 2) opens up room for the smaller onions in the patch to get big. If you’re familiar with the phenomenon of overcrowding, this should make perfect sense to you.
Too many sunfish in a pond? Fish them hard until the population gets back into balance. Anyone with a pond and fish knows this. Stunting happens when there are too many individuals for the space and resources. Fun fact: It happens to people, too. Historically, human populations that are too dense produce smaller humans. The average native American was far taller than the average English settler. This brings up the relative worth of a largely wild diet versus one based on large-scale agriculture, but I digress…
I had a patch of wild Sierra onions in Californa’s El Dorado County I tended for damn near 20 years. I pulled several pounds of wild onions from it each year. I left the state last year, and that patch was twice the size it was before I showed up.
Why? The trick is how you harvest.
First, take the large ones. Leave everything else. Second, do that replanting thing with the roots and bulblets. Third, do what I call “stick and move,” which is to go to a spot, grab a couple big onions, move on to the next part of the patch.
Some things to remember: Never take all of any patch, never bother a little patch, and never take the pioneers — the advance guard growing on the outer edges of a larger patch.
How big can patches be? Um… gigantic. I’ve seen ramps stretch for a mile in a hardwood forest, and football field-sized patches are common. Most of the other wild onion patches are smaller, and require a bit more legwork to harvest a useful amount, but even in the Western mountains, once you find them, you can get what you need in a mile or two.
Now, there’s a caveat here. I am talking about harvesting wild onions on either private land, or in places where the public land is so vast chances are you’re the only person harvesting, or maybe there’s one or two others.
Where the ramp shamers have a point — I love that term, coined, I think, by my friend Sam Thayer, who, with my other friend Alan Bergo, did a fantastic video on ramps — is when we’re talking about small patches in easily accessible places frequented by lots of people.
You can absolutely strip mine an onion patch. You can absolutely destroy one, and since many wild onions take a long time to grow to harvestable size, you’d ruin it for years. I’ve seen this.
I’ve also seen a patch decimated by well-meaning foragers using the 10 percent rule: Each takes 10 percent of the patch, but not knowing that the patch has already been hit, each successive gatherer takes a smaller 10 percent from a dwindling patch.
So in, say, a city or county park, maybe it’s not a good idea to harvest.
Most professional foragers I know harvest private land, and many have been picking the same patches of ramps every year for 30-plus years. They know, as well as any good farmer, that you don’t eat your seed corn. The sustainability of any bulb, corm, root or rhizome harvest all hinges on how you pick the plant.
There is at least one case where strip mining an onion patch is a good thing. In the West, there is a non-native, invasive wild onion call the three-cornered leek, Allium triquetrum, that is almost as gaudy as the ramp. I loved them when I lived in California, yet even my zealous harvesting of a creekside patch near my house barely made a dent in it. But I wouldn’t feel too bad about it if I had.
No matter where you are reading this, there’s an onion for pretty much every environment, from deserts to forests to streamsides to lawns to high above the treeline in Alpine meadows. For example, North Dakota has Allium textile, the prairie onion, which stretches throughout the shortgrass prairies of the Great Plains. My favorite is the dusky onion, A. campanulatum, which is common in the mountains from California to British Columbia.
You may even have them in your lawn. That one’s likely A. vineale or A. canadense, the bear onion. It was the very first plant I gathered, as a toddler. Yeah, I had stinky breath as a little kid…
One fun trick is to plant wild onions in your own yard. I did this with the three-cornered leek in California (I know, it’s invasive, but I kept it controlled), and have just started with ramps in my yard here in Minnesota. You can even eat most of an onion, leaving the bottom with the roots, then plant that part. Ramps like partial shade, for what it’s worth. This works with any allium, by the way.
If you’re looking for more of a foraging guide, I wrote a tutorial on wild onions here.
Bottom line: If you’re not a jerk bent on strip-mining a patch for profit, and if you follow these guidelines, not only can you harvest wild onions, but you can actually help them grow by selective picking — and planting.
OK, ramp rant over. Carry on.
Hank the problem is there is so much demand from the public and how is someone to know that the person picking along the supply chain followed the practices that u espouse… in fact we have seen in pennsylvania and other places closer to nyc whole large ramp patches decimated over the past decade… as well as younger and younger ramps without barely even a bulb in whole foods. This is why we pick leaves. Its very clear to the consumer what our practice is and it is also what nordic and other europeans tell me they do.
I learned to forage as a kid, and my grandparents had rules: never take the first plant you see, never strip a patch, only take the biggest plants, replant the little ones, leave the pioneer plants to spread further, leave a few big old plants to set seed (or in the case of fungi, to drop spores). I heard that the early forest harvesters who gathered ginseng and golden seal learned to gather and replant seeds and plant back the top of the root to regrow.
They also taught me not to pick from roadsides or places that have been sprayed or are polluted. And to be very, very sure of identification for both plants and fungi since many edible ones have poisonous lookalikes. Which also raises another important point: if something looks like an onion but doesn’t have the onion scent, it is very probably poisonous.
We have Allium triquetrum, angled onion or threecornered garlic, as a weed here in Australia too. It is invasive, but delicious!
I still teach my grandparent’s lessons to my students nowadays.