With ramp season nearly here, many West Virginians are preparing to harvest the wild, onion-like crops.
With ramp season nearly here, many West Virginians are preparing to harvest the wild, onion-like crop.
“I like to describe it between an onion and garlic, and it’s super versatile in cooking,” Amy Lovell, Monongahela National Forest educational representative, said. “It’s not something you can get all year long, which I think people really gravitate to as well.”
Guidelines for ramp collecting include only harvesting ramps from patches with more than 100 plants and only collecting around 20 percent of each patch to allow the remaining plants to mature.
When digging bulbs, use a soil fork or hand trowel so as not to disturb the roots of neighboring plants, and make sure to cover any bare soil with leaves to keep invasive plants from growing nearby.
Lovell said the act of harvesting ramps has seen an uptick in popularity in recent years. Ramps can be eaten raw, pickled or fried, or used in dishes like meatloaf and potato soup, among other uses.
“We see children these days going out with their parents and their grandparents to harvest ramps, and it’s really an intergenerational activity that happens in Appalachia,” Lovell said. “And even now, ramps are gaining a lot of popularity, even in large cities. So, in the spring, you’ll start to see them pop up on menus and restaurants in urban areas.”
Places like Monongahela National Forest have restrictions on how many ramps individuals can harvest. The maximum amount is two gallons per person, or 180 plants. Collecting the plants for commercial purposes, including reselling those originally harvested for personal use, is not allowed.
Ramp seeds and transplants, however, can be planted in a personal garden.
“They like really rich, cool moist soil under deciduous trees, so our oak trees or maple trees are birch trees,” Lovell said. “That’s where we typically find grant ramps growing. So if you can mimic those conditions in your home garden, you’re gonna have a really good harvest of ramps.”
Lovell also noted transplants mature more quickly than seeds; transplants take two to three years to mature, while seeds can take up to seven years.
Monongahela National Forest spans ten counties in eastern West Virginia, including Barbour County, Grant County, Tucker County, Randolph County, Greenbrier County, Webster County, Preston County, Nicholas County, Pendleton County, and Pocahontas County. Lovell reminds visitors that when harvesting ramps, make sure to prepare for the weather and any emergencies that could happen.
“This time of year, the weather can be really unpredictable, so we can get snowstorms still, we may get sudden thunderstorms or flash flooding,” Lovell said. “So just make sure that if you’re coming to harvest ramps from the national forest that you’re prepared with appropriate clothing and extra food, extra water, a flashlight and batteries in case you get stranded in the dark.”
It’s the peak of the peach season here in West Virginia, and lots of folks are clamoring to their nearby farmer’s markets to get some. But the late frost this year did a number on the state’s peach crop, and some say it was the worst frost in 30 years.
Orr’s Farm Market has been family owned for generations. It’s located in Martinsburg and has been around since 1995. But the legacy of the orchards that fuel this family market has been going strong since 1954 when it began with only 60 acres. Now, that number has increased to 1100.
“About 450 acres of it is peach trees,” said Katy Orr-Dove, Retail Market Manager at Orr’s Farm Market, “our other big crop is apples, and there are some adjoining family farms just south of us here, so it’s not all us, but a lot of it is us.”
The Orr’s say their property is home to the largest peach orchard in the state. About 15 to 20 percent of the family’s peach crop is kept and sold in-state at their farm market. The rest is sent for wholesale at various grocery stores along the East Coast.
But this year, farmers all across West Virginia, like the Orrs, saw a late frost that the state Department of Agriculture says was substantial. A department spokesman says the damage itself was hit or miss across the state, but the frost devastated many peach orchards in the Eastern Panhandle.
“It hurt all over West Virginia, the late frost,” said Walt Helmick, West Virginia’s Agriculture Commissioner, “but not like it does here. Here, this is the area that you watch the most, because this is where those industries that are dependent on frost free nights exist.”
Helmick attended Romney’s Peach Festival earlier this month. The Hampshire County Development Authority says about 2,000 people came out over the course of the weekend – celebrating the crop through song, dance, a parade, and foods like peach pie and peach ice cream.
Helmick says West Virginia is 15th in the United States for peach production with about 5,000 tons harvested on average each year. But Helmick says that’s only a quarter of what was produced at the industry’s peak in the state in the 1920s and 30s.
As for how much this year’s late frost impacted the overall productivity of the industry in West Virginia – Helmick says he’s not sure yet. But at Orr’s orchards, 60 percent of their peach crop was lost.
“From what I’ve heard from my uncle and my father, this is a once in 30-year type of a frost,” Orr-Dove said, “and so it’s not very common, and so this is the first time I’ve had to see us deal with this kind of a loss.”
That caused the price of a bushel to increase by 2 to 3 dollars at the Orr Farm Market. Orr-Dove says while there were fewer peaches on the trees, that allowed the peaches that did survive to grow larger.
“They had more room to grow on the trees since there weren’t as many,” she said, “So, you know, my customers are very happy this year, and they haven’t really noticed it; there’s a lot less wholesale going on to the grocery stores though.”
Roughly 80 percent fewer peaches are headed out from Orr’s to retailers this year. But Orr-Dove says that fact hasn’t got her family down – they’re looking forward to next year’s harvest.
Since the show began almost two years ago, A Change of Tune has highlighted some of the best up-and-coming artists out of these West Virginia hills with podcast-y chats ranging from Tyler Childers to Ona, Bud Carroll to Coyotes in Boxes and beyond.
But those interviews have been a bit infrequent, and since West Virginia Day was this month (and with A Change of Tune’s second birthday on the horizon), we thought we’d do something special: 30 days, 30 brand new #WVmusic interviews that range from Morgantown alt-rockers and Parkersburg singer-songwriters to West Virginia music venues and regional artist management and beyond, all of which contribute to this state’s wild and wonderful music scene.
And for our final #WVmusic chat, we are chatting with Kanawha-by-way-of-Logan County multi-instrumentalist Jeff Ellis. After playing in a number of local bands over the years (including Harvest and Guinness Clarke’s Wine) and releasing more than a few solo records, Jeff is ready to show the world his new band and his new sound, but not before giving us an idea of the number of #WVmusic people who have helped him along the way.
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days’ new release is Modern Time Blues. Hear more #WVmusic on A Change of Tune, airing Saturday nights at 10 on West Virginia Public Broadcasting. And for more #WVmusic chats, make sure to go to wvpublic.org/wvmusic.
Credit Melissa Stilwell Photography
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Jeff Ellis and 40 Days perform at The V Club in 2016.
Interview Highlights
On his love for music:
I always wanted to be a musician, since I was probably 11- or 12-years-old. I’ve played music, I’ve written songs, and I’ve always strived to be better. Ultimately, I would love to do that for a living and make enough to support a family on that. But as Ian Thornton and Todd Burge have said in earlier interviews, if music is the only thing you’re doing, you’re going to have a hard life. You’ll have a good time, but it might be short-lived and very stressful.
I made a decision early on, at 17 as a matter of fact, that I was going to have a dual career. It’s actually the only reason why I joined the Army Reserve instead of Active Duty. Army Reserve, I can do my one weekend enough, go do some Active Duty time, make enough money to where I could still make music, and still work a part-time job. And that worked out for a while. Time went by and, 18 years later, here I am.
On balancing his life with the Army and his career in music:
I’ve got to spend a year in Austin, Texas. I’ve got to spend a year in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I’ve spent too many years in Iraq and Kuwait and places like that. But each time I go do this, I’m able to save up a fairly good amount of money so when I come back, all the songs I’ve written during that time period, I’m able to go into a studio, I can fund it myself, and I can hire and pay the musicians. And it gives me a chance to play in those areas that I normally wouldn’t get to. So in that regard, it’s worked well. But there have been a lot of sacrifices.
In 2002, for example, I had a chance to go out and do a demo with Raine Maida from the band Our Lady Peace. I was stationed at Fort Bragg at the time, and I met him in Columbus, Ohio, and slipped him a demo a couple weeks before. The stars aligned, the dude calls me, and he was supportive of the songwriting. Then he shoots me an email and asks if I would want to go to California for a weekend and record a demo. So I go to my command at Fort Bragg and they’re like, “Our Lady who? No, we’re not going to give you a four-day pass to go out and make a demo with a rock star.” That sucked real bad [laughing].
On Active Duty, it was almost impossible to have a dual career. I would book these shows, but then at the last minute, they would tell me I couldn’t go.
Credit Melissa Stilwell Photography
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Bud Carroll and Jeff Ellis have known each other for quite some time.
On Jeff Ellis and 40 Days’ band name:
I didn’t want it to be The Jeff Ellis Band because we had done that before with different people, so I wanted this to be distinct. I told the band to come up with a band, and everyone started putting names in the hat. Someone threw in 40 Days, which is actually a song I had written years before. I was raised in a Baptist Church, and 40 Days is significant for times of trial and temptation throughout the Bible. That was always the one I tried to shoot down just because it had been the song title, and I didn’t want it to be the band name. I was thinking about The Heartbreakers, but that was already taken [laughing]. But everyone voted on their favorite band name, and I was outvoted.
Credit Jimbo Valentine
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Huntington-based artist Jimbo Valentine designed Jeff Ellis and 40 Days’ new album artwork.
On his new release Modern Time Blues:
A lot of the songs were written in a police cruiser, I’ll start with that [laughing]. I try to write songs that I think are interesting, and usually those come from real people who I’ve met that get turned into characters and real events that get somewhat fictionalized. A lot of the stuff on this record are real events, real people that I’ve come into contact through police work or military work that I just had to write about. Writing time is hard to find, by the way, when you have two kids, which is why I do most of it in a police cruiser [laughing]. I had a bunch of songs and took them to Bud Carroll. Thematically and sonically, this is probably the strongest record we have done.
On his music career goals:
Two of my goals in life were to play Mountain Stage and to meet Bruce Springsteen, and I’ve knocked those two out. He has no idea that he met me, but he shook my hand at a concert, and I was like, “I’m not washing this hand for a week.” But I was fortunate enough to do Mountain Stage, and then I got to do it again, which was phenomenal. If I got to meet Tom Petty now, the trifecta would be complete.
Music featured in this #WVmusic chat:
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days- “On the Right Road Now”
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days- “Poor Penny”
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days- “Never Enough”
Jeff Ellis and 40 Days- “So. Charleston City Beat Blues”
