Wild Ramps

Our wild ramps were hand-picked in a sugar maple forest in NY's Adirondack mountains in the spring of 2021. Ramps are a wild onion, one of the first forest plants to mature every spring. They need altitude, rich loamy soil, low temperatures, sunlight and space to grow. These conditions exist for only a few weeks in mid-spring — before the ground has warmed up, before the other plants have crowded them out and blocked the sun. Ramps propagate slowly and can take several years before they mature to their full size. They grow in clusters on the forest floor, especially around the bases of old-growth trees.

One of the challenges with ramps is figuring how to harvest this slow-growing wild plant sustainably. We opted to pick only the leaves (and not the bulbs, which will re-grow new leaves every year) and to only harvest a small percentage of plants from each cluster. Our ramp leaves were foraged on the land reserve where New Leaf Tree Syrups tap trees for their excellent maple, birch and other tree syrups. They were hand-picked by a group of H-2A agricultural experts from Jamaica who also tap maple trees for syrup and maintain upstate NY's extensive apple orchards. 

Meet the Forager: That's Omar in the photo above. Omar is a carpenter back home in Jamaica, but for the last few years he's been spending the late winter/early spring in the Adirondacks, snowshoeing through the woods, setting taps in thousands of maple trees. We were lucky enough to have his help harvesting ramps (which he also likes to add to broths, curries and other dishes).