Day one of work at the chook pen

Yesterday we commenced clearing out the weeds at the top of the property, at the spot we refer to as "the chook pen". We are clearing it to get new garden beds started for winter vegies.
This pic was taken a couple of weeks ago from outside the fence. You can see the outdoor kitchen and the shack in the far left. I'm planning on taking photos along the way to show the progress from an overgrown patch to a productive vegie laden haven!

By the end of the day, after Forest removed the Morning Glory from the fence, and slashed the grass down low, we could see through it, and it looked like this:

There's a lot of work to do up there.. the whole perimeter is fenced but in places the fence is coming down and needs repair work because it has been wrestled down by overgrown morning glory.
http://www.weeds.org.au/cgi-bin/weedident.cgi?tpl=plant.tpl&state=nsw&s=&region=nnc&form=vine&card=V03

 

Morning glory looks quite beautiful, it has gorgeous large purple flowers scattered over its lush green heart shaped leaves.. but omg what a nightmare to remove and detangle!
We have been cutting and pulling it off the fencing and it just grows back so fast that it feels like mission impossible to get rid of it. It's throughout the garden beds too and it's kind of like strong spaghetti with quite amazing elasticity. The goats love it, so in the afternoon we took them up when we drove the compost and hay load up.. then let them freerange to help us with getting rid of it.

There is an actual chook pen up there that hasn't been used for a number of years, but with some work I hope to get it back in action. Apparently a car reversed into it, so it's off it's foundation bricks and the chook run has collapsed around it, and then had morning glory go nuts all over it..lol so it's not a job i can do on my own or with Forest, so at some point when there's a good amount of manpower around, it might get back onto its base and we can put some chookies in there!
You can just see the chook pen on the right in the pic below.




We only have one machette, so Forest used that to cut long grass down while i weeded the beds. I've been a bit reluctant to be up there on my own with the grass so long because a few weeks ago Forest had a snake strike at him from the roof of the shack up there.
http://www.whatsnakeisthat.com.au/nsw/northern-rivers.html

 Here is the room Geoffrey built a couple of decades ago.

The sunny patch in the middle of this pic is where we're clearing weeds for the vegie garden bed. There have been gardens here in the past so the beds and paths are identifiable once the weeds are removed.

It got so hot that by late morning it was well and truly time to get to the creek.. so we left to cool down. It's the first day we've had together in a while and it was so lovely to swim in the sprinkles of sunlight that reach the water through the rainforest above.

Our occasionally freeranging goats, Gertie and Bronson

 

This is the garden bed where we have basil already growing. Luckily the goats leave basil alone.. and there's not much else interesting them at this spot in the garden so they're not trampling it either.