A homesteading guide is only worth reading if you can trust it. So here's exactly how we make one: where the facts come from, how we keep them current, and what we promise never to do. If any of it slips, we want you to be able to hold us to it.
We start from primary sources
Every guide begins with the source of record, not with someone else's blog post. For anything to do with the law, your money, food safety or an animal's welfare, we go to the UK's tier-one primary sources first: gov.uk and legislation.gov.uk for the law, the Food Standards Agency for food safety, APHA and DEFRA for animals and land, HMRC for tax, the NHS for health, and the RHS for growing. For the everyday how-to we lean on established horticultural and veterinary references. We quote the source and link straight to it, so you're never taking our word for it.
It's written for the UK, not copied from abroad
Most homesteading advice online is American. Wrong climate, wrong units, and laws that simply don't apply here. Follow it and you can lose a growing season or fall foul of a rule you never knew existed. So everything we publish is metric, in °C and £, timed to the British seasons, and true to the law where you actually live. And because the rules often differ between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, we say so on the page rather than pretending there's one UK answer.
We put a date on the things that change
Laws get amended, deadlines move, prices drift. On guides where the facts can go stale — the legal and food-safety ones especially — we record the month we last checked the page against its sources and show it right at the top, next to the author's name. If a page has been reviewed by a specialist, their name and the date appear too. It's our way of promising the page is looked after, not just left up.
We don't make things up
This is the line we won't cross. We never invent a statistic, a source, a review or a star rating, and we never write “we tested it” unless we did. If we can't stand a claim up against a real source, it doesn't go on the page — or we tell you plainly that it's our judgement rather than settled fact. Where the honest answer is “it depends” or “nobody really knows”, we say that instead of papering over it.
We're honest about money
Some of our links are affiliate links: buy something through one and we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend, and we mark those links plainly wherever they appear. The full detail is in our affiliate disclosure.
Found a mistake? Tell us
We get things wrong sometimes, and we'd much rather hear it from you than leave it up. If a fact, figure or bit of law looks off, email ben@fixrsystems.com with the page and what's wrong. If you're right, we'll correct it and note the change in that guide's changelog.
Common questions
UK Homesteading is published by Fixr Systems Limited, a company registered in England & Wales (Companies House no. 15889598), based in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. More about us on our about page.
