“L ife 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 ve…