The spring ramps and morel season has drawn to a close here in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. For wild food connoisseurs, there are few foods that bring as much delight as these early forgeables. For those of you unfamiliar with these local native delicacies, ramps are wild leeks (Allium tricoccum) and morels (Morchella spp.) are soil dwelling wild mushrooms. Most people in the Southern Appalachians obtain these wild spring foods by hiking through the forests and collecting them, or in the case of ramps, by going to a local ramps festival. If you have never attended a ramps festival, I encourage you to do so next year. A few of us enterprising individuals have a third option; we grow our own. Ramps are easy to cultivate, but morels are a different story. I know of several people who say they have successfully grown morels here, but I’m not one of them. You can purchase morels at many farmer’s markets. Or you can grow a different mushroom like shiitakes (Lentinus edodes). They aren’t in the same class as morels, but homegrown ramps and shiitakes are still a wild food winning combination!

Plan for your next years gourmet wild foods garden now. Both ramps and shiitake mushrooms grow in moist, shaded areas, so select a site for them in the woods or along the shadiest side of your house or an outbuilding. The easiest way to grow ramps is from seed, which surprisingly is easy to find. Ramps prefer a soil that is low in pH (we have that here naturally) and high in calcium (we don’t have that here), so working a little gypsum into the soil can be beneficial. In the fall, rake the soil to loosen it and prepare a good seedbed, and then sow the seeds thinly in rows about three inches apart. Press the seed gently into the soil and cover with several inches of compost or leaves from the surrounding area. Occasionally, ramp seeds will germinate the first spring after sowing, but usually they wait until the next spring, i.e., about eighteen months after sowing. During that time, keep the planted area weeded and mulched. When the plants first emerge, they will look like little blades of grass. By the second year, you’ll have recognizable ramp plants. After the leaves die back in late spring, a flower stalk usually develops and a head full of black seeds are produced. After the seeds fall to the ground, cover them with mulch to help increase your population of ramps. Or you can harvest the seeds and sow them elsewhere. After five to seven years, your ramp bulbs will be ready to dig and eat. An option that more and more people are choosing to use is to harvest the leaves for eating instead of the bulbs. That way, the plants keep growing back each year. You can start cutting off a leaf or two from each plant by the second year of growth. If the garden area is kept weeded and mulched and not overharvested, your ramps patch should last a very long time.

Shiitake mushrooms grow on logs. In late winter or early spring, acquire freshly cut white oak logs that are three to four feet long and three to eight inches in diameter. You can purchase shiitake spawn (that’s like the mushroom “seed”) from a number of companies in the U.S. Drill holes in the logs, insert the spawn, seal the holes with wax, and stack your logs in the shade. Depending on the strain of spawn you purchased, you will have mushrooms in six to eighteen months. After the logs have fruited once, you can force the logs to fruit every few months by soaking them in water for a day and then stacking them again. In about five days, you’ll have mushrooms. Otherwise, you can just leave the logs alone and they will fruit naturally when temperature and moisture conditions are right. I have had logs produce mushrooms at my home for up to eight years.

Dr. Jeanine Davis is an associate professor with NC State University located at a Research and Extension Center in Fletcher. Her research is focused on alternative crops, organics, and medicinal herbs. She recently co-authored a book, Growing and Marketing Ginseng, Goldenseal, and Other Woodland Medicinals.

Thanks to Juliet Blankespoor and the Blue Ridge Naturalist program, www.unca.edu/ncccr/brnp, for providing us with a list of wild food plants.
Resources:
Information on growing ramps and shitakes:
Davis, Jeanene; Persons, W. Scott Growing and Marketing Ginseng, Goldenseal, and Other Woodland Medicinals published by Bright Mountain Books (brightmountainbooks.com)
Horticulture Information Leaflet available online: ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/pdf/hil-133.pdf.
Sshiitake production guide: ces.ncsu.edu/nreos/forest/woodland/won-20.html
Purchasing Ramp Seed
You can purchase some at elk-mountain.com, mountaingardensherbs.com, or brwm.org/sandymushherbs
Purchasing Shitake Spores:
Field & Forest Products at fieldforest.net
Fungi Perfecti at fungiperfecti.com
Mushroom People at mushroompeople.com

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