Yay, winter is finally maybe over, and now it’s spring, season of rebirth and new beginnings, lambs and April showers and unicorns and rainbows, hooray. Alas, for me it is a time of fairly joyless reckoning, when I am reminded of the top three endeavors I’ve actually put effort into being good at but still really, really suck at: golf, Lithuanian-style Easter-egg dyeing, and gardening. There, I said it. And of those three, gardening is the most vexing, since failure carries the consequence of not getting food.

I possess a black thumb of withering death. If I’d been born into a preindustrial farming community, best-case scenario is I’d be shunned. Back when I lived in apartments, it wasn’t as painful, since apartment dwellers are not really expected to grow things. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, but container plants didn’t produce jack. Even the upside-down hanging tomato plant was a complete failure. So when I moved into a place with an actual backyard, I was filled with fuck-yeah optimism and tried my hand at a for-real garden. But despite hedging my bets by throwing money at the project, i.e., starting off with boutique (not from Walmart) grown-ass plants, using a shit ton of prefertilized moisture-retaining growing medium, and even spraying precious, precious beer on my plants to prevent aphids or fungal infections or something, I managed about five pounds each of tomatoes and peppers from two dozen plants. As a memorial of my shame, I left my “garden” untouched, a graveyard of wispy stalks and fallen-over tomato cages. The very next year, it became absolutely verdant with all manner of non-fruit-bearing, not-planted-by-me plant life. Touché, universe. The only plants immune to my death touch are weeds.

Nevertheless there is an undeniable, even primal allure to getting food old-school style, and so I tried my hand at foraging back in 2007 (“City Gardens,” Eat Me, Nov. 7, 2007). And although I met with some limited success, it’s extremely time-consuming and the edibles I got were not exactly things from which you could build a meal. In fact, the quarry that eluded me utterly, and something upon which one could base a meal, were ramps, which were then experiencing what was probably their zenith of popularity and culinary trendiness. So I attributed my inability to find any to scarcity, since even then there were worries that wild plants were being over-harvested.

Ramps, for those who are unfamiliar, are freaking delicious. They are in the onion and garlic family, and look sort of like largish scallions, except the leaves are a bit broader and floppy, and the bulbs are tinged with purple. They have a really heady, garlick-y odor, and fresh ones have a sort of superconcentrated onioniness that creeps up on you after initial mildness. The leaves are tender and can be used as an herb, eaten raw, or sautéed, and the intensely flavored bulbs can be used like onions, as a flavoring agent or pickled. Ramps seem to pair really well with eggs, whether it’s just chopped up and sprinkled upon or to spike a homemade mayo or Hollandaise sauce (ramp mayo makes for a pretty stupendous shrimp salad). If you are lucky enough to acquire a whole lot of ramps, a) shut up and b) a great spring soup can be made with a broth made from the bulbs, garnished with chopped leaves, peas, and lemon zest. Allium tricoccum is native to the United States, and apparently “Chicago” is derived from a Native American term for “skunk place,” referring to an area where lots of ramps were to be found. Their strong flavor and early harvesting season have made ramps a real prize for those who can find them, both as a fresh ingredient after a long winter of preserved food and as a medicinal or restorative, often utilized as an ingredient in tonics.

Most importantly though, they’re wild, as in they just do their jobs and grow, without any help from humans—no fertilizer, fancy soil, or beer showers needed. They’re freaking weeds, man! And it suddenly all made sense—I may suck at growing inbred crybabies that needs constant coddling and watering and hugs and shit, but ramps? They’re hard, from the streets, independent, and hopefully, relatively death-proof like their backyard kin.

But being prized as they are, even if they’re not found on as many specials menus now as in years past, they’re exceedingly hard to find in markets, let alone in the actual woods. And given worries of ever-dwindling wild populations, plus with my lack of foraging skill, the outlook wasn’t good. Enter one Glen Facemire, proprietor of what he claims to be the only ramp farm in the world (rampfarm.com). A clearly awesome individual posted on a local foraging forum that he/she had purchased 2,000 ramp bulbs from Facemire: 1,400 to plant in the yard, and the rest to put back into the wilds of Baltimore County. How cool is that? Some straight-up Johnny Appleseed action right there.

But more helpful to me was the knowledge that growing at home was indeed possible, and that there was a retailer from which to get plants. Turns out you can start from either seeds or bulbs, the latter being more expensive, but the former taking up to 18 months to germinate and up to several years to mature. So yeah, I ordered the bulbs—in fact, the last few dozen that the ramp-farm guy had left, since I was so late in contacting him (the last week of March). He was nice enough to call me beforehand to make sure they would grow where I planned to plant them, and when I pressed him for care tips, he told me, “Well, they’re wild plants, so they should pretty much take care of themselves, as long as they have decent shade and some leaf cover to mimic their natural environment. You shouldn’t even have to water ’em.” Fucking yes.

> Email Henry Hong