“Life is good when you grow your own food” is the philosophy of Donegal man Barrie Quinn, one that has drawn more than 780,000 followers to his Instagram account, where he shares snippets of his life as a regenerative grower. For more than six years, he has told the story of Portnoo Market Garden, a small, chemical-free farm on the west coast of Donegal, as well as sharing candid chats, helpful videos and tell-all food tales. Now, he has put it all down on paper in a part-memoir, part-how-to book called Homegrown.
Over a video call on a late summer afternoon, Quinn offers a look at the spectacular south-facing hillside farm that started it all. He points out the house where his father grew up, where his uncle now lives, and the shed where his grandad worked as a blacksmith. This land has been in the family since the 1800s, when his great-great-grandparents first set up home, but Quinn’s is not a simple farm-being-handed-down story. When he was young, he had no real interest in growing and was working as a plasterer when, in 2009, he headed to Australia. While there, he ended up harvesting iceberg lettuce for one of Australia’s biggest supermarkets.
“It was my first taste of farm work – and it was awful,” says Quinn. But a seed was planted for him – it was the first time he had really thought about agricultural chemicals. “I became aware of names like glyphosate and Monsanto, and started to dig into it.”
Along the way he met his now-wife Yuka Quinn, from Japan, and together they started paying more attention to what they were eating. Weekends in Brisbane were spent tracking down organic produce and shopping at local butchers. By the time he moved back to Ireland in 2016, Quinn was hungry for better food.
“I had it in my head that I wanted to grow. Three days after I got off the plane, I was in my mam and dad’s greenhouse,” he says.
And so, Quinn grew, he read and he gave food away to neighbours, learning that he wanted to be able to produce food in a way that allowed him to be sure of “exactly where it had come from”.
He still had the day job, though, which at the time was fitting PVC windows. Then the Covid pandemic hit and work became precarious.
“I was cracking up,” says Quinn. “I was really suffering with my mental health.” Against this backdrop, he found solace in the garden, deciding to put everything into growing, and seeing results as early as August 2020.
“I had a huge amount of cucumbers and tomatoes and apples. I took photos in the back garden and posted on Facebook and said, ‘Anyone want to buy a box of veg?’ There was a bombardment of messages, and I sold everything. That was the point when I said, ‘I’m going to go fully in on this.’ That was the day Portnoo Market Garden was born.”
Quinn started to transform two acres of the family land that hadn’t been touched in decades. With YouTube tutorials and help from family and friends, he cleared land, learned to drive a digger and found a water source. Trees were cut, ground levelled and 2,000 bags of firewood hauled away. He googled polytunnels.
“There was so much work involved, I wouldn’t do it again,” he says, recalling blacking out from exhaustion while planting beetroot. “I went down on my knees to take a breather, and my face hit the dirt. It took my dad to say to me, ‘Barrie, you’re going home. You’re going home right now,’ otherwise I might have gone back to the beetroot after I’d come round.”
That first year in the garden Quinn planted about 28 different vegetables, but not everything sold. He realised rainbow chard was not a big seller in Portnoo, but soon the standout products became obvious, and now he does a strong trade in lettuce, kale, tomatoes, cucumbers, French beans, scallions and garlic.
One plot, now abundant with potatoes, did not start out like that. Quinn tried cabbage there first, but it didn’t take, and spinach was no better. When he tested the soil, he found toxic levels of copper; it turned out his uncle and dad had grown potatoes there decades earlier, spraying copper fungicide against blight every year, and that copper had sat in the soil ever since.
He presumed the fungicide had ruined the ground and so he covered the beds, until he read how sunflowers can take metals out of soil. “So I planted 250 sunflowers in there and pulled them out the next season. It’s meant to take two years to change the soil, but we tried it after one, and we got a massive crop. They had cleaned the soil; it was unbelievable. We grow potatoes there every year now, and they have been fantastic.”
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Every crop and every corner of the garden tells a part of his story. John’s Tunnel is a polytunnel his late friend John McCole, who taught him how to grow tomatoes, left to him. “It’s a really special part of the garden. I made a video of it a few years ago, and I started bawling crying when I was making it.”
Quinn’s social media videos have played a huge part in the business. He started out posting photos of the garden, then began talking to camera. “Initially, I thought if I just tell people how I’m growing things, it will help sell them. This is how I grow, this is how I do things.”
But his breakthrough came with a video about a scallion shortage in Ireland, caused by a hurricane in Mexico. “I think it really struck a chord with people because scallions feel so Irish. That was my first video that went big – 100,000 views, I think. Then I was like, hang on, people want to hear this stuff, and I had loads of it in my head.”
Six years on, he still shares plenty of shocking food stories, but he’s also wary of catastrophising too much. “I also want to talk about, ‘Hey, it’s not that hard to grow your own spuds.’ I always come back to that – growing your own, and how to do it.”
That balance runs through almost everything in his garden. Overgrown corners that might look neglected are essential, the building blocks that let him grow without chemicals. “We are always trying to rebalance the ecosystem. What people don’t realise is this is pest control. I’ve never seen so many ladybirds in the garden this year, and this is where they live. Then they come out on to my lettuce and eat any greenfly.”
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Quinn says he gets most questions about slugs. “I have a long answer and a short answer. The short answer is using things like copper tape and sheep’s wool, but the long answer is to balance out your garden, not using chemical sprays, creating a water source, building habitat. Leave grass to grow the way it should. A pile of old sticks, a pile of rocks. It can be anything. They all work together. So nothing gets out of whack, and there’s never too many of anything.”
Quinn credits the land itself, too. “The soil was pretty good when I came here. It’s a very unique place. There’s a section with incredible topsoil, and all I can come up with [to explain it] is the trees. Oak, rowan, all this plant life growing on this hillside for centuries, building up and down, growing.”
He shows me heads of lettuce planted stripe by stripe, colour by colour, for no real reason other than that it looks great. Lettuce is his biggest seller, which he finds ironic: after that first job in Australia, he swore he’d never look at another head again. In a tunnel bursting with tomato vines, he plucks one and wraps it in a basil leaf growing beside it, smiling widely. “This is a little perfect moment. Almost every day I’ll do this. There’s nothing like it. I take people in here just for that. It’s an experience. So fresh, oh my God.”
The only time he smiles more is when talking about his two children, aged four and seven. “It’s like a playground to them. Then they say, ‘I’m hungry, Daddy,’ and I’ll say, ‘Go down there and get yourselves a cucumber,’ and they’ll be munching away.”
Outside the tunnel, a slide made from water pipes leads down to another tunnel; it’s used for birthday parties, and for the tour groups who make the trip to Portnoo to meet Quinn.
“We have people from all over – gardening groups from Ireland, Scotland, England. People that follow me on social media. We do school tours too. I wish we could do more, but they’re time consuming.”
He admits to having hosted a few super fans: “Some people get overwhelmed when they get here, but a walk around the garden always sorts that out.”
Quinn says a book had been in his head since he started the garden, but he didn’t want it to just be a how-to; he wanted to tell the story behind it too. Some writing days were hard. “There was so much emotion. I had tears on the keyboard writing about my friends that passed, my dad’s upbringing. I didn’t think I’d have all those feelings writing about fruit and veg.”
He knows not everybody has a garden and that not everybody can grow, but he would still love us all to pay more attention to where our food comes from. That’s what he tries to teach at home. On Sundays, the kids pick nettle tops for an omelette made with their own hens’ eggs. At dinner, it’s “there are your spuds, Daddy, and that’s Cathal’s beef”. His kids know the names behind their food, and that’s a philosophy he would love to see spreading in the wider world.
Homegrown by Barrie Quinn is published by Gill Books. Follow Quinn on @portnoomarketgarden