About Lamp & Larder
Know-how for getting a household through a rough week, or a rough year.
Lamp & Larder gathers practical methods for households that may have to manage for a while without the usual services. It covers a pantry that lasts, a handful of wild plants worth knowing, heat and light and clean water while the grid is down, basic skills for a night outdoors, the habit of noticing what is going on nearby, and some sense about money in lean years. It is written for apartments and suburbs as much as for cabins, and it assumes an ordinary budget.
How it is written
No page has a byline. Where a page tells someone’s first-hand story, such as a year of living out of a car, it is retold briefly in indirect speech. The site runs no advertisements and no scripts, sets no cookies and sells nothing. Nothing here teaches the handling of firearms, and politics stays out.
Safety outranks tradition. Wild plants can kill, and several edible ones have poisonous look-alikes, so the foraging pages name those look-alikes and say plainly to eat nothing that has not been identified with certainty. Home canning, drying and curing can cause botulism and other food poisoning when done wrong, and those pages follow current USDA and National Center for Home Food Preservation guidance even where older methods differed. Anything that burns indoors comes with a carbon monoxide and fire warning. On water treatment, the pages follow CDC and EPA dosing, and any notice from a local health department overrides what is written here.
Reports of a mistake, above all one that touches safety, are welcome by email; the contact page gives the address.