Watts Burks is on his way up a mountain in Bedford County, looking for something that he’s found before. I agreed to not share the exact location.
“So this is pretty much the top,” he says as he reaches a ridge. The wind, which was blocked by the mountain, now blows freely. He’s run into what he’d rather not see on this hike.
“I’d rather not talk to these people,” he says. If they ask what he’s up to, he’ll say he’s looking for native plants, which isn’t untrue.
As he walks past the hikers, he looks over his shoulder.
“It's really strange to me, I think people have sort of like a confidence, maybe they think to themselves, ‘That might be a ramp.” He says they probably aren’t sure the plants they find lining this popular trail are Ramps - a popular, seasonal wild onion.
Ramps aren’t mass produced and take years to mature enough to be foraged. They’ve become very popular, spawning memes poking fun at city-goers' obsession with them. Scientists are concerned that they’re over-harvested to bolster au courant menus and the offerrings at farmers markets.
So amateur foragers like Burks don’t want just anyone finding out where they can jump on a trail and find ramp patches. He learned about the forest around here from his grandfather, and points out different plant and tree species.
Along the way he takes a few detours to apple trees in the hopes of finding morels, a type of wild mushroom. Ramps line the sides of the trail in some stretches, but he is taking care to look for one that’s mature enough, to keep the patches healthy.
Once he does find the right group of plants he takes out a pair of red scissors and a plastic grocery bag.
“The most sustainable way to do this, would be to clip one leaf off of each plant,” he says, snipping a single leaf off of each ramp. “You can see why people don’t really do that though because it takes forever.”
Most visible are the green tear shape leaves, which are broader and more textured than the tops of green onions. But other attributes are more closely shared; tendrils root the plant in the ground, and connect to a white bulb, which extends into a red-purple stem.
He demonstrates on a very small scale a slightly more destructive but productive method - cutting above the bulb to get some of the sweeter whites of the plant. He doesn’t though, demonstrate what some foragers do: uproot a whole cluster of ramps for expediency.
“Someone buying them at a restaurant… they’re buying pounds of them. You gotta go pretty hard to get a pound of ramps,” he says. A pound of ramps requires harvesting between about 20 and 30 plants.
This cutting or trimming of the greens is considered the most sustainable way of harvesting ramps. Andrew Manning, the executive chef at Longoven, a Richmond restaurant with a hyper-seasonal tasting menu, says all parts of the plant are in demand during the short season.
Manning has laid out his ramps on a table as cooks prep for a Thursday night service.
“These are coming out of West Virginia right near Snowshoe, actually… not to blow up his spot,” Manning says of the forager he purchased 35 pounds of ramps from the previous week.
“We try to utilize it and as many different ways as we can,” he says, pointing to mushroom scrap and ramp vinegar, pickled ramps, and ramp oil used to top oysters.
Manning’s description of how he uses ramps leaves no part ignored - even the tendrils are used. But he also says restaurants should be thinking about their responsibility to think about how foraging practices impact ramp populations.
“It’s a great gift from nature,” he says. “We should definitely respect and try not to, if you go on foraging, leave some behind so they can, they can reproduce and spread.”
Manning has been cooking with ramps about 25 years he estimates. That’s about the same amount of time that Jim Chamberlain has been studying them. He’s a research scientist with the USDA forest service, and researches products that are harvested from the forest that are not timber based.
“Food and medicine, basically,” is how he summarizes his expertise. He’s been based in Southwest Virginia for the past 27 years he says.
“Over the last 20 years, I've seen tremendous growth in interest in these plants. And I think in general, more harvesting is going on and more commercial harvesting is going on.”
As birds and squirrels chirp near his home, Chamberlain shares stories of firefighters that took him on an unexpected detour, as to not reveal their favorite ramp spot, and vendors at New York farmers markets that sell between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds of ramps in a season.
A solution to that pressure on ramps population is in his backyard: developing what’s called “forest farming.”
“We need to respect this plant. What I mean by that is figure out how to preserve them or conserve them, he says in his backyard which he estimates has about 10,000 ramps.
“To tell you the truth, I don't eat them much anymore. I just love the plants. I like looking at them and really appreciating in them.”
Next year, though, when he feels he has enough, he’s says going to make some pesto.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
