Here in South Australia, winter has arrived and the chill has finally hit us all at once! I hope people in the colder northern areas are feeling some of the summer warmth and getting growing again. It certainly feels like the community on here is a little quieter and the posts a little briefer.

This week's community feature

@eco-alex on the @ecotrain community

EcoTrain is an open, active, global community focused on sustainability and moving towards the healing of Mother Earth, and of course ourselves! We manually curate and up-vote posts using the #ecotrain tag, based on merit. We support posts that fit the general theme of "Things that help make this world a better place". This can mean so many things, and includes topics such as Homesteading, Vegan Cooking, Spirituality, Esoteric Knowledge, Gardening, Eco Building, Self Sufficiency, Sustainability, Healthy Living, Parenting, Biodiversity, Waste, Decentralisation, Biodiversity & Nature, Climate Change, Ethics, etc.. We especially love people who are engaged with us, and support those of you who are commenting and 'showing up', with 100% up-votes from our combined 20,000 Steem Power.

We also love posts that show what you're doing in your community and people who lead by example. We love posts which challenge traditional ways of thinking, doing and being and which offer solutions, ideas and thoughts that minimize our footprint, educate our children and help us to engage more openly from a freer place of responsibility and contribution. "ecoTrain is about moving forwards together into sustainability and a new level of eco-green global freedom."

HOW DO WE SUPPORT YOU?
We believe in generating abundance, but you should not have to sell your soul to have it. This means that there are no real rules or exact requirements, no points or votes needed from you. If we like what you post, we will show it with no strings attached. We just ask that you do not spam our tag with things that clearly don't fit. If you are not sure then please do post and we will let you know nicely in the comments that its not the kind of content we support.

1. Up-votes: Anyone who posts content using the #ecotrain tag will be considered for up-votes. Most good posts that fit our theme get good up-votes. We don't use any automation for up-votes and manually curate our tag. I would like to say a special thank you to @artemislives for helping me to curate and guide my votes. She is spending a LOT of time reading and engaging with you, and I am also following her voting trail so when @artemislives votes for you, so do I and the @ecoTrain account.
2. The weekly @ecoTrain Magazine. We post once a week with the best of the posts that we discovered each week. This gives you are chance to be seen by more people and get some more support and engagement.
3. The ecoTrain Question Of The Week is an ongoing community challenge that we have been doing for around 2 years now! This is always a fun and exciting question or even challenge. Sometimes we have prizes, such as the Abundance Challenge that is just ending with 50 Steem in prizes.
4. We do have a discord channel, and we use it sparingly for basic communications and sharing. It is like a cozy community with none of the unnecessary noise! Time is precious and we value our time and yours! You can join our discord group at: https://discordapp.com/invite/sxpEPJc

Things happening in the community.

Everyone is welcome to join in with the @ecotrain Question of the Week and this week's is "How do you know when it is time to give up on something?

This fortnight @ecotrain has teamed up with @naturalmedicine to bring us all a consumer challenge. Entries are accepted until 15th June.

Have you written about what you've been up to in the garden, this week? If so, go and drop your link at @wildhomesteading's weekly gardening contest and get in the running to win @steembasicincome shares.

Welcoming Newcomers

@vegetables joined Steem way back in 2016, but only just made a post. I wonder if we can encourage them to stay awhile before they take another 3 year break.

Some highlights of the week

What an amazing plant comfrey is and it can be so easy to propagate and grow. @sagescrub shares a bit more on using, growing and dividing this plant.

@thelaundrylady shares how her food forest is going and what lessons she's learned along the way. Share in her successes and failures here.

@wildhomesteading shares a different approach to watering, which we may not have thought of and brings into question whether we need to water as much as we think.

This week I've included a slightly different type of recipe with @goldendawne's step by step on making beeswax food wraps.

Thank you for stopping by. This week's newsletter was brought to you by @minismallholding.

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