When Stacey Givens awoke to find her house without electricity in February 2021, she pulled her boots on over her pajamas and ran to her barn, which shares the same power source as her home.
“I remember the floor [of the barn] was like an ice skating rink,” recalls Givens, who runs Side Yard Farm out of her Northeast Portland property. “Everything was frozen over.”
Givens was focused on one thing: The survival of the hundreds of tiny vegetable seedlings she had planted in potting soil just weeks before. The trays of seedlings had been placed on heating mats to counter the cold weather, but the power outage had turned the mats cold—and she didn’t have a generator to keep them running. Instead, she gathered heaps of white fabric usually used to prevent weeds from growing on garden beds, and gently tucked the sheets around the seedlings like a blanket.
“I stayed out there all night babysitting them,” Givens says. “And thankfully, they survived.”
