Rosina Buckman Visits

A nearby friend (who owns Wallaby Hill Farm, a 70-acre permaculture farm co-designed by Bill Mollison, reviewed here) mentioned last week that her mother would be visiting, and asked if she could come and have a look around my garden. “No problem,” I said, “just bring gumboots!”.

As I was showing them around the garden on Sunday, something about her mother was familiar. Then she mentioned winning a garden award a couple of years ago – turns out it was the Sunshine Coast Council’s 2009 Living Smart award for the Edible Landscape category.

Ah, that’s it!

Her name is Rosina Buckman, and there’d been an article about her and her garden at the Permaculture Research Institute web site.

Image credit: Craig Mackintosh, Permaculture Research Institute of Australia

Rosina was a wealth of knowledge around the garden, and identified several weeds for me (now I finally know what chickweed is!). I also found out that what I thought was a lemongrass plant (that never quite seemed edible) was in fact a citronella plant. Still useful around the garden, but certainly not what I thought it was!

We had a cuppa and a great chat about gardens, permaculture and everything else. Rosina mentioned that she’d had people at her home recently doing some filming of her in the garden, which was a lot of fun.

That night, I sat down at my computer and one of the first items in my RSS reader was this: Rosina Buckman’s Chop Chop Compost. What are the odds?!

Here’s a clip from the video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzQva2H735I

So of course, the next day I had to get out a plank of wood and my meat cleaver and give it a go! We had just picked the remaining pumpkins off our overgrown vine (14 big pumpkins from the one vine!), and I needed to clean it up and put the scraps in the compost.

I can vouch that Rosina’s “chop chop” method works great!

Oh, and here’s another video that she did a while ago on raised bed gardens:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saP_Dcgtg5w