Winter as a Time of Abundance?

Normally, I would think of Winter as being a time of scarcity.  The grass doesn't grow, the veges (mostly) don't grow and feed for ourselves and our animals is difficult.

While the grass is a fairly large problem this year because we're still in drought, it seems to be the only thing that is scarce for us.

We left our cull later than we should have - partly due to not having the funds to have the homekill man out and pay for the butchering of the cattlebeasts.  But suddenly, we seemed to have money thrown at us from all directions, so we got two steers, three pigs and three hoggets slaughtered.  I still did the butchering of the pigs and sheep and I'm still grateful that there was a two week gap between them as that was a lot of work to do on my own.  By the last sheep I was so over it that it got the barest minimum cuts made to still have meals worth having.

We bought a new chest freezer.  We dithered about it, we went back and forth between chest freezer and upright.  I know that while an upright freezer might officially be a certain size, you lose a fair bit of that in the shelves and drawers, but they are more user friendly.  We decided on the chest freezer in the end for it's capacity and it's now filled to that capacity.

I was a little disturbed by my hoggets.  They looked quite fat and healthy until their skins were off.  There was almost no fat on them at all.  All three were extremely lean.  It showed me that they were not eating as well as they seemed to have been.  Worms and parasites were not an issue on inspection.

I've been feeding out to my remaining sheep, especially as that's (hopefully) all pregnant ewes, but they don't seem to be interested in hay or balage.  They'll have a nibble at it and then go back to sticking their heads through fences to eat the shelter belts.  They all genuinely seem fat though and the neighbour thinks they're in good health.  There are just a few piles of hay still sitting in their paddock to be nibbled at now and then.

So we have meat in abundance because of the cull.  I will probably not need to buy meat for the next year at least and this time, there is variety.

Brownie my housecow seems to have ramped up production of milk.  Where I was getting two litres a day from her which was ample for our needs, I'm now getting between three and six litres.  The calf is still with her and she hasn't weaned him.  I'm also getting more cream from it.  I'm currently out of cheese cultures and the place I usually get them from is out of stock on my cultures, so I've got every possible jug and bottle filled with milk and it's still not enough.  I'm freezing milk as often as I have plastic bottles and freezer space to put it in and I'm still worrying about wasting milk.

So I have milk in abundance.

For some reason, my chickens have also ramped up their laying.  My youngest hens would be coming up to three years old, well past their prime laying days and it's been a cold winter, but lately, the eggs have quadrupled.  At this time of year, I expect maybe four eggs on an average day, I'm currently getting an average of 16 eggs a day.  I still have all the different types of preserved eggs I did a while ago so there's not much point in adding more.  I've been giving eggs to anyone who stops in.

And I have eggs in abundance.

Putting the bird-netting around the vege gardens has worked to keep the chooks out of my garden so that plants can actually grow.  We planted some winter greens that are doing very well.  In one of them, we mulched quite heavily with chook poo and sawdust from cleaning out the henhouses and some torn up egg trays.  Those plants are about four times the size of others in another garden that were planted only two weeks later - and that was a couple of months ago.  This garden is doing so well that plants I'd thought the hens had destroyed have come back and are growing well.  Plants that aren't supposed to live during winter, but they've had hard frosts that didn't thaw for a week and a couple of dumpings of snow and they're still thriving.

Soon it seems we'll have those veges in abundance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm loving it, but I can't quite figure out what I've done right to get so much abundance in Winter.