Happy Sunday! This week, Tina is the host of Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and she’s put a spin on this week’s topic – The Rule of Three. Hope you enjoy my gallery.

I attended a cooking class this past week at work. It was so fun and felt so nice to be cooking again. When I’m at home, my mom doesn’t like it when I use my own kitchen. She says I make a mess and that I’m clumsy but that’s what cooking is, isn’t it? Making messes? Anyway, she doesn’t let me cook and when she has to do it all the time, she would complain about it. *sigh. There’s no winning this war.

At the cooking class, I did make a mess because that’s what clumsy people do sometimes – make messes – but thankfully, no one cared. My co-workers didn’t clean up after me. Instead, I cleaned up after I was done because that’s what adults do.

The first thing we made was the foccacia bread because that needed time to ferment. Next came the handmade pasta with marinara sauce. I helped chop the tomatoes and the herbs. Having grown my own herbs, the herbs we were given did not look good at all. It was wrinkly and wilted. I didn’t get to see the preparation of the chicken parmesan as I was busy making the pasta. All in all, everything came out very delicious and I feel like I’m a convert now from dry pasta to fresh pasta.

In the garden, I have been told that planting in a group of three is attractive. Although I don’t typically follow this rule because I can only plant in whatever room I have but sometimes, planting in groups of three is all I can do.

These cabbages have been in since the end of February. I usually don’t follow guidelines for planting dates and spacing. If I planted my cabbages in late March, early April as suggested, they would be frying in the heat in minutes. The downside to putting them in the ground so early is that they will grow slowly until they feel the day length is sufficient to grow. It is now almost June and the big cabbages look like they might be ready to pick. As for the 3 cabbages behind the bench, I might just scrap those and call it a loss because they’ve been stunted enough that I doubt a head will form.

Except for the 2 tomato plants on the left, the 4 on the right are my back up tomato plants for in case something happens while I had gone on my travels. I usually plant my tomatoes 4 to a row but in this rare case, since I only have 4 back ups that needed planting…

I always plant French marigolds with the tomatoes, to prevent bad bugs and nematodes and what a coincidence – there are 3 marigold flowers on each plant. So 2 groups of 3 tomato plants and 2 groups of 3 marigold flowers.