Eli Anoszko, with his dog Beorn trotting alongside him, makes his way through the woods in search of a good patch of ramps, also referred to as wild leeks.
“Botanically I tend to say wild leek, and if I'm talking in the kitchen I say ramp,” said Anoszko. “Kind of like pigs and pork, right?”
In this particular section of Langlade County Forest, most of the trees arounds are varying shades of browns and greys with little to no buds yet.
It makes the bright burst of green on the forest floor stand out even more. It’s not just the ramps, though they are most prominent with their broad lance-shape leaves sticking up.
“In the forest understory here, we've got a lot of the other classic kind of spring ephemeral associates coming up,” said Anoszko.
Spring beauty, trout lily, and trilliums are all making there way up through the leaf litter. Anoszko likens this time of year to Black Friday for these plants.
“This is when they've got to make hay or they've got to capture resources,” he said. “It's what sustains them for the whole season.”
All these plants thrive in the spring before the trees leaf-out and block their sunshine.
“These always feel like magical fairy woodlands to me, especially the right time of day towards sundown,” said Anoszko. “You hear the frogs calling and some of our first migrating birds and it just feels like the world is waking up in the ramp patch.”
For these couple of weeks, foragers like Anoszko will harvest ramps to cook with.
The leaves he’s picking on this spring day will become pizza toppings alongside mushrooms harvested earlier.
In the past, he’s used ramps to make pesto, chimichurri, and, his ultimate favorite, compound butter.
“I'll do a dollop of that ramp compound butter on a steak, and it is just to die for good,” said Anoszko.
Sustainable harvesting
Wisconsin has two native wild leek species.
They thrive in rich soil. If a forest grows sugar maples, it’s often a good spot for ramps.
While they might be found throughout the state, finding places you can legally harvest them is a challenge.
Foraging for ramps is often restricted to private land as it's prohibited on state-owned lands and many federal lands. Some counties allow limited harvesting.
Just about every spring within the foraging community the conversation pops up of what sustainable harvesting of ramps looks like.
Ramps grow slowly, taking upwards of seven years from seed to harvestable.
“It is entirely possible to harvest ramps sustainably,” said Samuel Thayer, a Wisconsin author who’s been foraging his entire life and now teaches others how to.
He began his own research on ramps after reading a 1993 study that found “bulb harvest represents a threat for population maintenance of these largely clonal northern populations.”
“I had the question as well, what would be a sustainable rate of harvest and understanding how to harvest, how much you can harvest, and in which situations it would be sustainable,” said Thayer. “That's kind of what set me to doing this research.”
Experimenting on his ramp patches over the years, Thayer has found leaving at least five larger bulbs in a clump about the size of your hand can be sustainable.
“In my ideal world I would go back to a clump of ramp bulbs, I would pull out a clump of 30, and I would I probably leave six generally. Clump of 30, leave six,” said Thayer. “Then five to eight years later, I do it again.”
The big caveat to that is to make sure you’re paying attention to what’s growing around the ramps.
If they’re in sea of only ramps between the trees, then Thayer says they’re likely to continue doing just fine with selective harvesting of bulbs.
If there’s other plants they’re competing for space with or just not that many of them, Thayer says it can be easy to over harvest them.
“If you harvest your clump of ramps and you harvest down to six bulbs and there's all this Pennsylvania sedge around or trout lily around, it isn't going to come back as much or as fast,” said Thayer.
Many foragers like Anoszko only harvest leaves, plucking a couple from a patch and only one from a clump making sure to spread out the picking quite a bit.
For him, it’s a mix of why.
Anoszko doesn’t care for the taste of the bulbs as much as the leaf and then he doesn’t have to deal with cleaning the dirt off.
More importantly, he wants to be a responsible public land user.
“I think different rules apply if it's your own slice of heaven, your own sugar bush or something. You can determine what's sustainable there,” said Anoszko. “But on public land, especially with increased interest in foraging, I try and have as light to touch as I can.”
Harvesting ramps can be a bit trickier to navigate than other food people like to forage in Wisconsin.
For Anoszko, putting in the extra work to find a good spot and harvest responsibly is worth it for that first taste of spring.
“It's so nice to eat something that's green and local this time of the year. All winter long, I feel like I've been eating dried things or heavy stew,” said Anoszko. “To me, it marks the start of spring and summer and a different culinary palette.”
