Semana da Primavera Biológica 2016

Para mais informacoes vá ao site: www.plantarportugal.org

The super vegan chocolate & banana cake

Tonight, for the first time, I made a vegan cake, a chocolate & banana vegan cake! And it was perfect!

If I hadn't done it by myself I wouldn't have believed it.

Neither my friends believed that something great would come out of a chocolate & banana vegan cake recipe! 

When they arrived for dinner I was still mixing the dry ingredients and I can tell you that the look of disbelief was great.

The ingredients for a Chocolate & Banana Vegan Cake are:

- 1+1/2 cups flour

- 3- 6 TBS cocoa

- 1 cup sugar

- 1 TSB baking powder

- 3 packages of Vanilla sugar (or 3 TSB) or 1 TSB of Vanilla essence.

- 2 banana sliced into small pieces

- 1 TSP Apple vinegar (or normal vinegar)

- 3 TSB Vegetable Oil

- 1 Cup of water

How to do it:

Mix all the solid ingredients until everything looks well blended. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix by hand. The oven should be preheated, 180º Celsius for 35 min. 

I used a rectangular shape cake form and it was enough for 6 servings. If the cake is not cooked completely it doesn't matter because it has no eggs. (My cake was really nicely cooked, only on one side it wasn't. Due to a part of the baking paper getting in between).

It's a cheap and fast recipe. You don't need to use props at all and in the end it's the perfect chocolate & banana cake that got all of us by surprise. I bet it will suprise you too.

Tip - Containers the great helper

What I can seed inside in a container I do so, that is one of the joy of container gardening!

If you grow inside you can start growing before the last frost in spring and be just ready to start transplanting the plants to the garden when the time starts to be perfect for that yaer gardening season! 

No matter how or where just start gardening

I started to be really interested in vegetable gardening and gardening in general when I realized I didn’t knew nothing about it.

I remember going to help a friend that her parents have a farm and I helped her to catch tomatoes and cucumbers. 

First I was surprised because when you catch tomatoes the tomatoes plant can stain your close but what really blown my mind was that the cucumbers had thorns...

Yes … I didn’t have any idea that some cucumber species have thorns and we just never see it because the farmers clean them out before selling them!

Then it came to my mind that if we were in an apocalyptic world and there was no more food and I was starving I could be standing on a field full of potatoes that I wouldn’t know it… and die.

So, for the same reason I started running I started learning about growing plants. à The zombie apocalypse!

I started growing plants at home and at my ex-boyfriend balcony. I don’t remember I had much success doing it but I remember we had a lot of ants and tomatoes! The main goal was to see how a potatoes plant, a carrot plant, a cucumber plant and so on look like. What they need, when we can plant them and so on.

It doesn’t matter if you start small. When you start something is all about experimenting new things and I guess also about failing! Even if it is a garden or in a balcony first you need to see what grows there and what you like more to plant.

But the most important think is not the end result but what you learned with it!

HM - How is like to have a stroke

《How is like to have a stroke?》

A very good description was made by Jill Bolte Taylor, is an American neuroanatomist, author, and inspirational public speaker on her TED talk "My Stroke of Insight".

(You can see the full lesson here:http://ed.ted.com/lessons/jill-bolte-taylor-s-stroke-of-insight)

I know people with Hemiplegic Migraine don't have really strokes but they share allot of the symptoms and is hard to describe to others what is like to have this happening to you. 

I listen to her story while I was doing some tasks and I was all the time having "THIS IS IT! Was exactly like this!" moments.

Share this video with your family and friends.  In the end of it the speaker talks about the moral of the story and is very interesting.

Tip - Seed or not to seed

In Portugal I always bought plants to transplant. It was more save and produced fewer waists. Here in Germany I didn’t find yet these plants to transplant so I have to use seeds.

If you have a small garden buying plants to transplant to your garden is the smartest way but if you have a bigger garden the cheapest way is do it is by using seeds.

Anyway using at least once seeds is great to learn a little more about growing plants.

JANEIRO - Calendário da Época das Sementeiras

JANEIRO

Semear: Agriões, Aipo, Alho Pôrro, Alfaces, Beterraba de Mesa, Cebolas, Coentros, Chicória, Couves diversas, Ervilhas, Espinafres, Favas, Nabos Serôdios, Nabiças, Rabanetes, Salsa, Tomates, Beterrabas Forrageira.

Flores: Ciclamens, Crisântemos, Ervilhas de Cheiro, Gipsófila.

Flores (Bolbos): Begónias, Dálias, Gladíolos, Gipsófila Vivaz, Gloxínias, Liliuns, Jarros.