Ramp (Allium tricoccum Ait.) weight differs across the harvest season: implications for wild plant stewardship and forest farming

Abstract

outside of this region resulting in the development of commercial collection and forest farming. Accordingly, there is a need to identify harvest and stewardship practices that can lessen harvest impacts on wild populations and improve forest farm production. One important component of ramp production is harvest timing, which typically occurs between March 1 and May 30. This study examined the influence of harvest timing on yields, using seven recognizable phenological stages. Total ramp and bulb weight increased 250% and 400%, respectively, between early season and late season stages. This trend was observed regardless of leaf number; three-leaved ramps were significantly larger than two-leaved ramps at each phenological stage. Based on these results, two ways to promote ramp conservation are to delay ramp harvests until ~ 30 days after emergence in the spring to ensure that the late season stage has been attained and to restrict harvesting to three-leaved plants. Because ramps are mostly sold by weight, both actions will lessen harvest impacts by significantly reducing the number of individual plants being removed from a population to achieve a desired weight. However, this must be balanced against the greater contribution of three-leaf plants to seed and clone production.

Habitat associated with ramps/wild leeks (Allium tricoccum Ait.) in Pennsylvania, U.S.A: guidance for forest farming site selection

“…Forest farming is of interest to forest landowners in the eastern US (Strong and Jacobson 2006; McLain and Jones 2013) and incorporating ramps into this practice as a NTFP creates an opportunity for both conservation and income generation. Intensive horticultural practices used in forest farming such as bulb division (Dion et al 2016) and selective harvesting (Dion et al 2016;Nilson et al 2023) can increase growth rates and productivity, helping to meet market demand and reduce foraging pressures in the wild (Burkhart 2011; Davis and Persons 2014). This cropping system would also allow landowners to generate income on a more regular basis than through timber harvesting and may be compatible with production of other NTFP's such as maple syrup, goldenseal, and ginseng.…”