SteemTrail – GARDENING Category Guidelines and Curating Team

Are you a gardener, florist, farmer, permaculturist, or just love to get your hands dirty? Do you enjoy planting vegetables, digging in the dirt and making things grow? If you have stories of your experiences growing plants outdoors or indoors, for food or pleasure, caring for gardens or farm animals, planting trees or WWOOFing around the world, we’ll read them! Not only will your posts be read by the curators of @gardening-trail, but if your posts meet our guidelines, you may gain our support and have your posts recommended to other users and curators!

There’s much more to this than voting, however. We want to build a great Gardening community on Steemit – and we want you to be a part of that community! Our team will work tirelessly to make sure that happens.

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The @gardening-trail Curating Team

These are the initial @gardening-trail team members. We each have gardens and grow right now, and some of us have worked in the garden and farming industry. Please browse the posts of these users if you want to get to know them better or to see their activity on Steemit. The following data is rounded and current as of October 21, 2016.

• @luzcypher | Reputation 64 | Power 3200
• @jed78 | Reputation 60 | Power 887
• @haphazard-hstead | Reputation 55 | Power 300

We will post an introduction containing short bios for each of the team members next week. This team will continue to grow and we have a team of people ready to upvote posts that meet the following guidelines.

The @gardening-trail Guidelines for Posting

Please review these guidelines for the Gardening category. These are not strict rules, but following these guidelines will certainly improve your post quality and your chances of receiving support from @gardening-trail – and also receiving recommendations for curation by @steemtrail.

Original Content – We appreciate enthusiasm about gardening experiences you have personally had. More than that, we would like to see original writing, images, and personal touches in your posts. Your knowledge, experiences, photos, or tips will add content that readers will desire and value. Show us something unique or personal about your garden and your posts will have the chance to jump to the front of the curating line.

Accurate Tags – If your post is primarily about gardening, then please tag it accordingly by using “gardening” as your primary tag. This will help sort the posts that we curate for the gardening category. Posts that are not properly tagged will have a lower chance of receiving upvotes from the @gardening-trail account. But don’t worry! We will help guide you and offer our assistance along the way.

Proper Citations – Content that is copied or plagiarized will not be eligible for curation. If you’re using images, quotes, or copied information from another source, cite those sources accordingly. If you use your own imagery, please let us know. It will not only make our job as curators easier, but it will also let your readers know that the images are original – adding a personal touch that may better connect you with your readers and followers.

• **To cite images from other sources, add a link below the image like this, **
  

Formatting – Posts that take advantage of Markdown and HTML to increase personalization and style will be more noticeable, not only to us as curators, but for readers in general. Formatted posts with good and relevant titles and headers will receive more consideration than others that have not been formatted. This is important for search engine optimization (SEO), but there is a balance to be reached and there are many options available to customize the formatting, so it may take some time to figure out what works best for you. Again – we will offer guidance for this, if needed. You can also visit @steemprentice in RocketChat for additional assistance with this. They have a good team and there is a lot of information for new and old users alike pinned in that channel.

Good Writing – We really don’t want to nitpick spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation errors, but a well-written post is important for readers. Multiple spelling and grammatical errors can diminish the perceived value of a post. Give your posts a read before publishing them and correct any mistakes you find. Then give it another read! Your followers will appreciate the effort – and so will your curators here. Mistake-free posts will certainly help with our selection process.

These are recommended guidelines for our curation team. We are not commanding everyone to conform to these guidelines. You may post as you wish and offer whatever content you desire, however you desire. This is only an attempt to help organize and curate the Gardening category – to help with creating and rewarding quality posts and to attract and retain content creators to the Gardening community on the Steemit.com platform. There are no penalties imposed on any user for not adopting these guidelines.

Join Our Curating Trail!

If you post regularly in the Gardening category or enjoy reading posts on the topic, please consider joining our curation trail. The number of followers on the @gardening-trail will impact the amount of rewards for the chosen posts. If you want to support our community initiative, following this trail will help accomplish our goals – and also earn you additional Steem Power rewards. This option would be especially ideal for those users who do not currently reach the daily 40-vote target.

The @gardening-trail account can be followed by obtaining an invitation code for Streemian.com and joining our trail there. If you are interested in joining this trail, please let us know in the comments.

Our Gardening-trail account will initially target a minimum of 20 posts per day for curation. As the team and platform grow and improve, those numbers will be adjusted. Likewise, as Steem Power increases, voting weights may be adjusted.

Updates on Progress, Changes, Curating, and Contests

We will publish a weekly post about our curating statistics and related information. Any changes to our curating habits and targets will be posted as necessary to keep the community informed. The rewards from our information and update posts will be used for increasing the Steem Power of this account and for covering costs of development and the curating teams.

We are also discussing contests and other ideas for community engagement. If you have any suggestions for contests, please let us know in the comments below.

Encourage People to Join Our Gardening Community!

Bringing new users to the Steemit platform is one of the objectives for the @steemtrail project. If Gardening is one of your favorite topics or categories, then tell people about it! If you know anyone who wants to share their gardening stories and experiences, encourage them to join us and participate in the Gardening community. They don’t need to know everything about Steemit to enjoy themselves here. We want to tailor this community for gardeners, gardening enthusiasts, and anyone who enjoys reading and commenting about it.

The same applies to existing users. Tell us your stories. Engage with us. Support others in the category. Join our curation trail. When you join us, you’ll know that 100% of our efforts will be focused on the category and topics you love. You – the users – will ultimately shape the future of @gardening-trail and the Gardening community on Steemit! Bring your friends, your family, and bloggers that might enjoy reading and posting, and may want to contribute to what we’re trying to accomplish!

If you have any questions or feedback, please leave us a comment. Curation for @gardening-trail has now officially begun!

Don’t forget to follow us here on Steemit, too: @gardening-trail