Courtney Brooke: Hi there. Well, I’m gonna share a really exciting thing that’s happening right now in our yard. So, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of wild ramps, but they’re an Allium, in the onion clan. They grow in the wild mountains around here. You can go wild harvest them; they are a food.
Planting Ramps at Home
Some people plant them in their garden also. We’ve planted some here, and they’re an ephemeral.
So that means that they come out in the early spring before the trees have leaves on them, and they soak up the sunlight, and then they to put that energy into their roots to come back again next year.
We have planted some here in this little patch of forest that we have in our land which is small. There’s probably, like, 15 trees in here. It’s a tiny little forest and it still spring. The trees, as you can see, don’t have any leaves on them yet, barely at all. And I was just walking by and I noticed that the ramps are popping up.
That’s them there. That’s them, that’s them. We planted these here.
Delicious Little Indicators
We have a few; enough to have a little celebratory snack on them. But we know that when they come up here that they’re starting to come up in the wild mountains around, and we can go wild forage and harvest some and usually just go once a year. And then we freeze them into ice cubes and just take a few and leave the most of them and just have them as a wild food in our lives.
We’ve planted these here as little indicators to let us know when it’s time, because, you know, if we drove all the way to the wild mountain places like an hour drive and then two hour walk and all that…
So, we have these here to let us know. So, we don’t go too early and we don’t go too late.
Exciting! Ramps!
You can get them. You can buy bulbs from different plant vendors; they sell trays of ramps, and you can plant them out in your yard.
Enjoy Now and Throughout the Year
They are really delicious. You eat the leaves and you can also eat the bulb. The bulb is really small. We mostly just eat the leaves and we blend it up with olive oil and then put it into ice Cube trays so that we can just pop the ice cubes. We put them in a bag, and we can just use one ice Cube whenever we need to put it in some special pesto or put it in some pasta or whatever like that.
Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live.
Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing.
Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between.
Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.
