These prized wild leeks, native to the Northeast, have long faced pressure from high demand. Researchers are investigating how harvesting practices can boost their sustainability.
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These prized wild leeks, native to the Northeast, have long faced pressure from high demand. Researchers are investigating how harvesting practices can boost their sustainability.
May 28, 2025
Wild ramps, harvested near Bridgeport, Connecticut. (Photo credit: Cavan Images, Getty Images)
Near the banks of the Delaware River in northeast Pennsylvania, Steven Schwartz, his silver hair tied back beneath his hat, is searching for a seed. It’s ramp season, and finding one of the tiny black pellets is like searching for a needle in an endless green haystack. For a ramp farmer like Schwartz, the seeds are a critical indicator that the population is healthy and multiplying.
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At 71, Schwartz has learned plenty about these wild alliums since he moved here in 2006—and he’s eager to share.
In early May, the woods all around him are carpeted with lush green ramp leaves, clumped so tightly together it’s hard to tell one plant from the next. At last, he finds what he’s been looking for and takes a seat on a fallen log. As a woodpecker hammers in the distance, he picks up a dried seed head, left over from last year.
“This,” he said, “is what it’s all about.”
Ramp seeds are a sign that the wild leeks are multiplying. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
The ramp, a spring ephemeral that has become the most popular of dozens of wild alliums native to North America, grows across the Midwest and Eastern United States, particularly in the Great Lakes region and throughout the Appalachian range. Similar plants can be found in deciduous temperate forests around the world, including in Europe and East Asia, where the victory onion and Siberian onion, respectively, prosper. Other cousins flourish in the western U.S., especially the Pacific Northwest, including Brandegee’s onion and the swamp onion. But none have developed the ramp’s reputation as a beacon of spring.
Within their fleeting window of availability, foragers and consumers prize ramps for pickling, grilling, pesto, or any adventurous way to enjoy their gentle bite. Here in Pennsylvania, their leaves peek out in April, and by late May they have begun to deteriorate, turning yellow and dying back to make way for a flower stalk. In some regions, the season can stretch to June. The early summer blooms develop seeds by the end of the summer, which eventually fall to the ground as one of the plant’s two modes of reproduction, the other being bulb division.
“It’s the test of the hypothesis that you can eat your ramp and plant it, too. And it looks like it’ll work.”
Every spring, dozens of visitors come to Delaware Valley Ramps, Schwartz’s wooded 20-acre property in Equinunk, to pick the glossy, garlicky greens that are the first to emerge after winter’s thaw. Schwartz offers his wisdom on respectful harvesting to visitors who pay $65 to pick ramps for two hours. He asks them to take only those with three leaves, which are more mature than those with one or two, so they all have a chance to reproduce before they’re picked.
He waits until later in the season to allow harvesting, because larger plants require fewer to make a pound, leaving more in the ground to sustain the patch. He also urges visitors to take only one from each clump so that none is overburdened, and he rotates through several patches to keep them all thriving.
It’s the least he can do to protect the population he found in abundance on his property when he bought it, lured by the Delaware River’s revered wild trout fishery. Although his land has no shortage of ramps, their future elsewhere is under pressure.
In the early 1990s, after Martha Stewart first sang their praises and fine-dining chefs began putting ramps on seasonal spring menus, demand soared, especially in urban centers where they often sell for $25 per pound or more. Eager foragers fanned out into the woods, and it wasn’t long before concerns grew about population decline.
The whole plant is delicious, but every bulb removed from the earth is one less to sustain the wild population. For years, conservationists have worried that avid harvesting of bulbs will endanger a plant whose value is as much cultural as it is commercial.
In both Indigenous and Appalachian communities, ramps are celebrated as a sign of spring with medicinal properties that can revive the spirit after a long, hard winter. Horticulturalists and ramp enthusiasts are working to better understand where and why they flourish and how humans can encourage their proliferation before it’s too late.
For more than a decade, Schwartz’s land has been a “living laboratory” for research conducted by Eric Burkhart, an ethnobotany and agroforestry teaching professor at the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, where he studies the conservation and management of forest products. His conclusions are in a paper, published last fall in the journal Wild, about the habitats most favorable for ramps: rich, deep soil on north- and east-facing slopes, with an abundance of sugar maple or bitternut hickory nearby to supply calcium and moisture for growth—much like Schwartz’s land along the Delaware River.
Although ramps grow wild, they’re often tended by property owners and harvesters, like Schwartz, who practice forest farming, which Burkhart describes as the cultivation and management of non-timber products under a forest canopy. Ramps and other forest foods are “the crack people can look through to get excited about their forests, rather than just seeing them as a source of timber revenue,” he said. And unlike most forest products, consumers already crave ramps, so expanding their supply can help harvesters meet demand while ensuring the plant population isn’t depleted.
Steven Schwartz takes notes while observing the characteristics of ramps growing in one of six test plots. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
Schwartz’s land is a suitable place to explore the potential of forest farming, because his methods are clearly working: His land now produces more ramps than ever. He’s seeing new patches flourishing on the property where none had grown before, which means their range is expanding, possibly due to the seeds being dispersed more widely by turkeys and other wildlife.
Today, his property includes a half-dozen 6-by-8-foot plots dedicated to studying whether ramps can be successfully regrown after they’re harvested by replanting the base of their bulbs. The study, designed and run by Schwartz in collaboration with Burkhart and still funded by a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education producer grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, aims to help balance productive yields with long-term conservation.
“It’s the test of the hypothesis that you can eat your ramp and plant it, too,” Schwartz said as he surveyed the ramps in one of the study plots. “And it looks like it’ll work.”
Ramps have long been an important wild food for Indigenous cultures, often consumed therapeutically to treat colds, earaches, and infections. They are welcomed as the first green vegetable in the spring to replenish vitamins and nutrients after a winter of dried and preserved foods.
Karelle Hall, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a member of the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware, visited Schwartz’s property this spring as part of a broader effort to relearn ancestral traditions and get more people in her community to engage with ramps and other culturally significant foods, she said. A cousin who joined her that day operates the Native Roots Farm Foundation, focused on reconnecting Indigenous communities with their plant relatives.
Although she’d purchased them before at farmers’ markets, it was Hall’s first time harvesting ramps herself. It felt particularly significant to do so right beside the headwaters of the Delaware River, which supported the Nanticoke and Lenape tribes in pre-colonial times, she said. With her harvest, she made soups and stews, ramp butter to eat with a venison roast, and ramp salt that she’ll share with relatives to strengthen her community’s connection to the plant.
The approach to harvesting that she saw at Delaware Valley Ramps echoes the practices central to Indigenous relationships with the natural world, she said. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, for example, advocate taking just the leaves so bulbs can continue to propagate.
The gentle manipulation of a landscape can help a plant species feel more at home, encouraging it to grow into the space it’s allowed, Hall explained, as long as one rule is always followed: “Never deplete it to the point that it can’t repopulate itself.”
Jeanine Davis, an associate professor in horticultural science at North Carolina State University, has kept that principle in mind for more than 30 years, ever since a botanist in her state government asked for her help studying ramps as concerns grew about their declining population.
Within a decade, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, straddling North Carolina and Tennessee, made ramp harvesting illegal; three national parks in West Virginia followed suit in 2022. Although studies on the subject are scant, Burkhart said populations have diminished over time, but in Pennsylvania, at least, the issue is not overharvesting but the fact that favorable ramp habitats have been developed for other uses.
“Someday, if we continue doing this, we won’t have ramps. It would be one more piece of the forest that’s gone.”
Back when she started studying ramps, Davis said the general consensus was that they couldn’t be cultivated, but she helped show they can indeed be grown, given the right conditions—including slightly acidic, moist soil and sufficient shade. She’s now researching how different harvest practices—say, the number of leaves or portion of a bulb taken—affect a population.
In addition to her work with the plants themselves, Davis has studied the role they play in the mountain communities that have celebrated ramps for generations. There, she said, they are “like a spring tonic,” rich in nutrients and minerals, including vitamins A and C. A 2000 study, she noted, found that thanks to their naturally high quantities of selenium, ramps have the potential to reduce cancer in humans.
Davis remembers the “mind-boggling” volume of ramps she saw the first time she attended one of many annual festivals in Richwood, West Virginia, about 25 years ago. “Pickup truck after pickup truck full of them,” she recalled. She was impressed by how the festival was truly a community effort, with the entire town seemingly involved in some way.
In time, though, as ramps gained broader popularity, “What we’d always thought of as a food for country people, hunters, and fishermen was suddenly a gourmet item,” she said. Although she’s enjoyed seeing more people appreciate the plant, its success poses a challenge for conservation efforts.
On Schwartz’s property, ramps are part of a spring understory populated by fiddlehead ferns, morel mushrooms, and flowering trilliums and bloodroot—the type of biological diversity that indicates a healthy forest ecosystem, according to James Chamberlain, a retired research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service who studied ramps for 25 years. Given the ramp’s fickle growth habits, its presence in a landscape suggests a stable and supportive tree canopy and healthy soil.
Steve Schwartz considers himself an accidental forager. Eighteen years ago, he bought a property in Equinunk, Pennsylvania, to gain access to the Delaware River’s vaunted wild trout fishing. Then he discovered ramps growing abundantly on his property and has been selling them since 2008. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)
But Chamberlain worries that ramps may soon go the way of ginseng, another plant once abundant in the Appalachians that he said has been “genetically extirpated from the forest” by unsustainable harvest practices.
“Someday, if we continue doing this, we won’t have ramps,” Chamberlain said. “It would be one more piece of the forest that’s gone.”
However, a 2019 paper that Chamberlain co-authored in Biological Conservation suggested wild cultivation and good stewardship practices could reverse that trend in ginseng and other wild-harvested plants like ramps. He believes forest farming can be part of supporting the sustainability of ramps and other wild plants, when done right. But doing so requires careful and respectful management of a patch that allows it to sustain itself.
“We get up in arms about cutting old-growth timber,” Chamberlain said, “but think nothing about harvesting old-growth ramps.”
For his part, Burkhart wants more people to engage with the landscapes around them, particularly through forest farming, which he believes can harness the woods’ “tremendous potential” to support our food systems. In a state like Pennsylvania that’s nearly 60 percent forested, managing a greater share of the land in an intentional way and utilizing its products can create income sources while promoting conservation, Burkhart said. He also studies ginseng as well as goldenseal, used in herbal medicines.
“We have a whole suite of wild species that people either forage or forget about, but they deserve close examination and consideration as new crops,” Burkhart said.
Despite conventional wisdom about how to sustainably harvest ramps—some suggest taking only the leaves, while others limit themselves to one-tenth of a patch—there is still little actual evidence to guide foragers and forest farmers. The study on Schwartz’s land, which began in 2023, aims to deliver that evidence. This was his second season observing the growth of ramps whose bulbs were replanted in the ground after being harvested.
Using variables including the number of leaves at the time of harvest, the point in the season when harvest occurred, and the amount of bulb that was replanted, he’s studying how well they bounce back year over year. So far, the most mature bulbs appear to have the strongest rate of return.
“What’s going to be best for this plant, for the forest, and for all the other beings sharing the ecosystem?”
Once the study is complete, Burkhart wants to expand it to other locations across the state to develop more certainty about the findings and their implications. Schwartz says replanting bulbs in the past has helped him develop new ramp patches, suggesting that further understanding of favorable sites and successful conservation techniques can make a meaningful difference.
For Hall, the Indigenous anthropologist, the vibrant ramp patches in Equinunk hold the promise that more members of her community can engage with the plant and share some of the same excitement she felt. But when it comes to the conservation and management of a food found on the forest floor, she offers a reminder that there are always deeper layers to consider.
Hall’s work focuses on language revitalization, including the conversion of the Nanticoke language into writing. She’s still working on a full translation of the ramp’s name, pumptukwahkii ooleepunak, but she says it conjures the process of a plant popping out of the ground. Like the names of many other plants with a bulb or root system, it’s referred to in Nanticoke as a living being—a who rather than a what. We should remember this as we harvest ramps, she said.
“It’s not just about what’s going to be best for us in this situation,” said Hall. “What’s going to be best for this plant, for the forest, and for all the other beings sharing the ecosystem?”
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I planted ramps in RI that I purchased on eBay from MI back in 2020. They didn't all take. Did have a seed head one year. This year they propagated back to the same number I planted. Unfortunately there is invasive burning bush and lily-of-the-valley nearby. Ah well, srill hoping for more spread.