[upbeat folk music]
[gentle acoustic music]
- Inga: From the city to the hills of the Driftless Region,
I took a hike into the forest,
where I found Bjorn foraging for ramps,
a wild food that appears for a short time
only in the early spring.
Hi, Bjorn. - Hey, Inga, how are you?
- Good, good to see you. - Good to see you.
- It's nice to be out here in the ramps with you.
- Yeah, totally.
- I always know when spring is here,
is when I see you out ramping around.
- Definitely, definitely.
It's one of my favorite things to do in springtime.
- So, look at all these beautiful,
this is the most I've seen, ramps.
And for folks that don't know, what is a ramp?
- They're actually a native plant in Wisconsin,
and they're in the Allium family,
which is what onions are in, garlic is in, leeks are in,
so they're a relative of onions, garlics, and leeks.
And they grow wild in Wisconsin,
in usually north-facing maple forests,
and they're a perennial, so they just come back
year after year after year, and they're super delicious.
- I love, well, I love anything garlic,
anything that has a strong flavor, I'm all about it,
and that's one of my favorite things about this,
is just, it's really pungent; you know what you're eating
when you're eating it.
- Definitely, definitely, definitely.
Yeah, you know, you get a little bit of that garlic breath,
but I think it's a great thing for spring.
- It's worth it. - Yeah, totally, totally.
- Have you found that wild food, especially ramps,
is becoming more and more popular?
- Yeah, I feel like it's getting more and more popular.
I know for me, about the same time I started
seeing them on menus, I was like, "What are ramps?
I have no idea what these are."
And a friend introduced me to them,
who I was helping with their maple syrup operation,
and I had never known what a ramp was,
and I was walking through them all the time
in the springtime.
Yeah, and like you, I love garlic and onions and leeks
and essentially, it's just a combination
of all those things that I love.
- Yeah, and I was reading about ramps a few years ago
and I read in Appalachia, they're really popular,
and people would go out and harvest these,
just like I do with nettles because it was that first green,
and they were full of that, all that nutrition
that we'd been missing for the whole winter.
- Yeah, it's kinda-- - And it's just a cleansing.
- Yeah, it's kind of like a spring cleansing tonic.
At least for me, I just love, you know,
you've gone through the winter eating lots of potatoes
and carrots and stuff like that.
- Don't show me another squash. [laughing]
- It's all good, but getting that first local
green thing of the year is just super rewarding
and fresh and bright, and so,
ramps are just some of the first things
to come out of the ground here in spring.
- Here's what else I love about wild foods
and things like this, is you don't really
have to do anything to them; it's not like you're out there
weeding away all these other things so they can grow
or having to bring out compost for them.
They just, they do their own thing.
That's the kind of harvesting I like to do.
- Yeah, yeah, that's the beauty of ramps
and native perennials like this is,
they just do their thing, they're there, they grow,
and you just have to come out and harvest them.
- Speaking about harvesting,
I know it's important not to overharvest.
- Yeah, I'm glad you brought that point up.
That's super important to talk about.
Ramps are a really slow-growing species.
They reproduce in two different ways.
They'll produce seeds and then they'll also
produce little rhizomes
where they'll reproduce off to the side of the plant,
and what's crazy to think about is,
when they reproduce with seeds,
it takes five to seven years for a plant
to be able to produce seeds, and then once it produces seeds
and it drops those on the forest floor,
it can take anywhere from 6 to 18 months
for those seeds to germinate.
- So, if we all got really excited
and went out and collected all the ramps in this area,
we could really be destroying that habitat
or that whole plant system.
- Yeah, totally, it's really important to be,
have sustainability in mind.
I know all the ramp patches I harvest from,
I only take a tiny bit of the population that's there,
'cause I want to enjoy them into the future,
and I want other people
to enjoy them in the future. - Sure.
- So, yeah just, I think it's so important that
if people are going and harvesting ramps,
they just take a little bit here and there
and they can come back every year and enjoy.
- So, a lot of times I noticed
you'll just harvest the leaves, but if we,
could we harvest one of the bulbs
just to kind of see what they look like?
- Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Yeah, and so typically, they grow in these clumps
as you can see right here,
there's kind of a clump of ramps between us,
and what I think of is, there is one seed,
way years ago, maybe 20, 30 years ago
that germinated in this spot
and it's kind of been shooting off rhizomes or seeds,
and we can dig one up to kind of show you,
and they're pretty hard to get out of the soil.
You can't just pull 'em, like a carrot or anything.
There's quite a bit of roots. - Mm-hmm.
- And then when you pull 'em up,
they usually come up kind of in these clumps here.
- Okay. - As you can see.
- They're beautiful to look at.
- Yeah, yeah, definitely, and what I find interesting
is there's this little, kind of sheath of skin,
and this is the ramp from last year
when it was full-sized. - Oh!
- And so, you kind of have to pick that off,
and I always try to get as much soil off of them as possible
'cause it takes a long time to clean these
when you actually dig the whole entire plant,
but that's pretty much it.
And you can, I usually trim off the roots.
- Uh-huh.
- And then you can eat from the bulb,
the stem, all the way up to the leaf.
- What's your favorite way to eat them?
- I love ramp pesto actually.
Really early in the season, when they're smaller,
they're very fiery, they have a really strong garlicy
and oniony flavor, and I love making pesto that time of year
and eating it throughout the season from my freezer.
- Ah, I know.
I think I'm gonna do a pesto,
but since I'm cooking for some folks
that maybe aren't used to that fieriness.
- Yes, definitely.
- And that intense garlic like we are,
I'm gonna put a little bit of kale in
to help mellow it out a little bit.
- Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
I bet that'll be delicious.
- Well, I'm gonna harvest some more ramps with Bjorn
and then, why don't you meet me at our next stop.
[gentle acoustic music]
[upbeat folk music]