I have seventy plastic bags hanging on my back fence right now – lined up like quiet little experiments in patience.
Each one is a makeshift greenhouse – a gallon bag, filled with soil and seeds, snapped back together and left outside all winter to let nature do what it does. It’s called winter sowing, and the idea is beautifully simple: you plant in the cold, in the dark, in the season when nothing looks like it’s growing. And then you wait.
I started them in February. It’s April now, and most of them have germinated. Little green shoots pressing up through the soil, proof that something was happening even when I couldn’t see it.
A few bags still look empty. My gaura. My baptisia. No signs of life yet – just dark soil sitting in a plastic bag, looking like nothing at all.
I know that feeling.
When Nothing Looks Like It’s Growing
When I first suspected Anderson was autistic, I didn’t wait for a diagnosis to start planting.
I read everything. I stayed up late researching. I ordered flashcards and started sign language. I changed his diet, added supplements, made appointment after appointment. I was planting in winter – in the cold, before anything confirmed that spring was coming – because something in me knew that the earlier I started, the better.
When Things Get Harder Instead of Better
And then things got worse.
Not gradually. Not subtly. Worse in the way that makes you question everything you thought you were doing right.
That part doesn’t make it into a lot of stories, but it needs to be in this one. Because if you’re in that season right now – where you’ve done everything right and your child is still struggling, still dysregulated, still not where you hoped – I want you to know: the bag can look empty for a long time before anything comes up.
For us, months passed before we saw the first glimmer. Anderson attending circle time at school instead of running from it. He was three. It wasn’t a breakthrough. It was a single green thread pushing up through dark soil.
At four, he got his AAC device and he could finally start to tell us what we wanted. At four and a half, he started whispering words.
I cannot describe what it is to hear your child’s voice for the first time – really hear it – after years of not knowing if you ever would. It was spring arriving after a winter that felt like it would never end.
But then came a late frost.
When Anderson was six, we hit a season of aggression and dysregulation that seemed to undo so much of the hope I’d been carefully tending. It was one of the hardest stretches of our journey. I had done everything I was supposed to do, and here we were, seemingly going backward.
This is the part of gardening no one warns you about either: germination doesn’t mean the work is done. A seedling is fragile. It needs the right conditions to actually take root and grow.
What Actually Helped: Regulation Before Progress
What changed everything for us was understanding that nothing could grow until his nervous system felt safe.
Not skills. Not compliance. Not output.
Safety. Calm. Regulation.
Probiotics, targeted supplementation, and a therapy approach that put regulation first – not skills, not compliance, not output. Just safety. Calm. A settled nervous system as the soil everything else grows from.
And slowly, the garden started filling in.
What Growth Looks Like Over Time
Anderson is seven and a half now. He is a gestalt language learner – meaning he learned language in chunks and phrases before individual words – and he has come so far from the little boy who couldn’t stay in circle time. He is generating more and more of his own independent speech. His therapists expect him to be fully self-generating his language next year.
I planted that seed before I even had a diagnosis. I planted it in the dark, in February, when I had no idea what would come up or when.
My garden is going to look completely different this summer. Seventy bags of perennials and annuals, plus everything I direct sowed – more color and life than my yard has ever seen. But I won’t really be able to show you until May or June. Right now it’s still mostly potential.
That’s okay. I’ve learned to trust the process.
And I’m still watching those baptisia bags every morning. The seeds that take the longest, that seem the most unresponsive, that make you wonder if anything is happening at all – sometimes those are just the ones that need the most patience and exactly the right conditions.
They’ll come up. Maybe not on my timeline. Maybe not all at once. But I’ve learned that “nothing” doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
If you’re in the winter sowing season of your parenting journey – planting in the dark, waiting, wondering – I see you.
Keep going. Spring comes – even when it takes longer than you thought it would.
More Posts About Autism
- How Video Modeling Helped My Autistic Son Learn Language (Gestalt Language Learner Story)
- Service Dogs for Autism Support
- Our Journey Through a Nonverbal Autism Diagnosis at 2.5 years
- Natural Environment Teaching in Autism: Why Real-Life Moments Create the Biggest Breakthroughs
- Creating an Inclusive Homeschool Environment for Autistic Learners
- How to Calm an Autistic Child Naturally: A Nervous System Reset That Changed Everything
- Autism and Dyspraxia: How Motor Planning Challenges Affect Children and What Helps