week of 2/27/02
 
 
 


Ramp collecting banned in Park
SMN
Park Superintendent Michael Tollefson has announced that The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has imposed a permanent closure on ramp collecting.

The ban comes as a result of a five-year Park study that showed that continuing to allow collection of the pungent wild onions was causing a decline in their population.

For many years National Park Service regulations have prohibited collecting of plants, other than certain renewable plant materials such as nuts, berries and mushrooms. However, managers at the Smokies have continued to allow visitors to collect limited quantities of ramps because ramp collection is a traditional mountain activity and because there was no evidence that allowing it was harming the Park’s ramp population.

“For many years we allowed people to collect a peck (about a grocery bag full) of ramps a day per person, for personal, non-commercial use, based upon the expectation that ramp collecting would eventually decline on its own as the native mountain-born people who grew up living off the land grew older,” said Superintendent Mike Tollefson. “This has not happened. The popularity of ramp festivals has led to a growing popularity of ramps and the appearance of ramp recipes in various publications like Southern Living have increased the demand for ramps.”

A five-year study called “The Impact of Harvesting Ramps in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park” revealed that it takes up to 20 years for a ramp patch that has been extensively harvested to rejuvenate.

“Based on field observations, we have found that ramp collectors often collect all of their peck-a-day allowances in one patch, leaving few if any plants to provide seed to regenerate that patch,” said Tollefson.

The study also showed that, contrary to traditional folk wisdom, ramps do not re-sprout if the collector leaves a little of the root-tip, or rhizome, in place rather than pulling it up roots and all. Biologists found that if a significant portion of the edible bulb is harvested the roots die.

Park officials say that the prohibition against ramp collection will not affect the popular ramp festivals or the sale of ramps at farmers’ markets because the ramps offered from those sources could not legally have been harvested commercially from the Park previously. Ramps may still be collected on private lands and on the 1.6 million acres of National Forest Service lands surrounding the Smokies.