This January, while most people were wrapped in blankets inside their homes dreaming up New Year’s resolutions, I was out in my garage filling milk jugs with dirt.
It’s called winter sowing — a seed-starting method where you plant seeds in repurposed plastic containers, leave them open to the sky, and set them outside to face whatever winter throws at them. No lids. No grow lights. No heat mats. No coddling. You trust the seeds to know what they’re doing, and in spring they reward you (hopefully!) with sturdy, cold-hardened seedlings that laugh at a late frost.
I should mention that I live in a neighborhood with an HOA. Right now, my side yard is lined with approximately 150 containers —some held shut with blue painters tape, each with a plastic spoon or knife stuck in the soil bearing the plant name in Sharpie. It’s a system. It’s a look. The HOA board has not yet weighed in, and I am choosing to interpret that as approval.
I collected some of these seeds myself in the fall — wandering my yard with little paper bags, snipping seed heads from coneflowers and salvia and blanketflowers among others, squirreling them away for exactly this moment. There’s something deeply satisfying about growing a plant from a seed you harvested from your own garden. You watched it bloom, you saved what it gave you, and now you’re giving it a second life — or a hundredth, if you’re me and apparently cannot stop filling containers.
Through January, February, and March, I checked on the jugs. I watched snow settle into the open tops and pile up around the sides. I crouched down to peer at the soil, looking for any sign of green pushing through. Some of them sprouted weeks ago and are sitting there looking smug, their little Sharpie-labeled spoons standing at attention. Others are still just dirt. But I haven’t given up on the quiet ones. That’s not how this works. Some seeds need more cold, more time, more of whatever internal process they’re working through before they’re ready. The fact that nothing is visible yet doesn’t mean nothing is happening.
The reason I have 150 containers is partly enthusiasm and partly math I did not fully think through. If even half of these germinate successfully, I will have far more plants than I have places to put them. Which means I get to do one of my favorite things: give them away. There is real joy in handing someone a little plant and saying, here, this came from my yard, it will grow in yours. Pass it on.
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Now here’s where I get professionally on-brand, because I can’t help it.
Winter sowing is an act of faith in things you cannot yet see. You do the preparation in the cold and the dark, trusting that the right conditions will eventually arrive. You don’t wait until April to start thinking about May. You do the work when it’s quiet, when there’s no urgency, when it’s just you and your Sharpie and a pile of saved seeds — because you know that spring comes whether you’re ready or not.
Estate planning is exactly the same.
Most people put it off because it feels premature. Nothing bad is happening right now. Why think about it? But the families I’ve worked with for 25 years who navigated a serious illness, or a sudden death, or a cognitive decline — the ones who had done the planning came through it with so much more grace. Not because they didn’t grieve. They did. But they weren’t simultaneously trying to figure out who had legal authority to make a decision, or untangle an estate with no roadmap, or manage conflict that the right documents would have prevented.
The ones who hadn’t planned yet? That’s a hard spring. And it could have been otherwise.
Some clients come in ready — motivated, organized, let’s get it done. Others come in for a consultation and then go quiet for a while. That’s okay. I don’t give up on them. Sometimes people need more time before they’re ready to face the hard things. The seed is in the jug. When they’re ready, so am I.
The point is to start. Do the research. Label it carefully. Set it out and trust the process. Some things sprout fast. Some things need the whole winter. But nothing grows from seeds still sitting in the packet.
This spring I’ll be out in my yard giving away plants to friends, watching the pollinators find the milkweed grown from a seed my sister started for me years ago, and feeling quietly triumphant about every single spoon-labeled jug that actually worked.
And if you’ve been meaning to get your estate plan done — or updated — consider this your Sharpie moment. Grab a spoon, write your name on it, and stick it in the ground. Start the process. I’ve got 25 years of experience helping people do exactly that, and I promise it’s less complicated than it sounds.
Even if your HOA board is watching.
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Robyn Smith Ellis, Esq. is an estate planning and elder law attorney at Vested Partners in Salem, Virginia. She has practiced since 1999 and has been coaxing seeds and estate plans to life — with roughly equal patience — ever since.
