Product reviews

How a product gets reviewed here

The homesteading and preparedness market runs on urgency. Countdown timers, “last kits available” banners, and a long tail of review sites that simply restate the sales page in the third person. A review is only worth writing if it tells you something the seller would rather you did not know before you paid.

So every review here has to do four things.

• Say what is actually in the box. Counts, formats, what is physical and what is a download, and where the numbers on the sales page disagree with the current packaging.
• Check the expert. When a product is sold on somebody's credentials, those credentials get verified against primary sources. Where other sites have them wrong, we say so and show the correction.
• Name who should not buy it. A review with no “skip this if” section is an advert. Every review here has one, and it is written before the recommendation.
• Separate research from testing. Where a product has not been used or grown by us, the review says so in plain language on the page rather than in small print at the bottom.

What is not here

There is one review on this page. That is deliberate — a new site with forty reviews has researched none of them properly, and it shows. Reviews go up when they are finished.

In the meantime, the growing guides cover the individual plants in far more depth than any review can, and the about page sets out who writes this and what the rules are.