Meet Dee Sewell of Greenside Up

Dee Sewell flicks through an old photo album from when she first moved to Ireland.

“They say getting pregnant is quite stressful, getting married, moving house,” she says. “But we did all that – and moved country – in the space of six months.”

Sunlight streams in the half-door of their renovated farmhouse, 1,000ft high in the hills of Co Carlow. A freshly baked courgette cake begs to be sliced on the kitchen table, while Xena the dog snores contentedly underneath. It’s harvest time at the one-acre small-holding, with its apiary, free-range chickens and resident porkers, Miss Piggy and Kermit.

“This year we are trialling the ‘Yellow Submarine’ tomato,” says Dee, before her husband Ian quips, quick as a flash: “You know the problem with Yellow Submarines? They attract Beatles.”

Dee rolls her eyes good-naturedly. A mother-of-three, she runs Greenside Up, a business that gets beginners to grow their own food, and is a founding member of the Community Garden Network of Ireland. She is also an award-winning blogger, with greensideup.ie picking up multiple accolades at last year’s Irish blog awards, including the overall title.

Move to Ireland

But Dee only started growing her own veg after a move to Ireland in the late ’90s signalled a fresh start for the family – and a real-life lesson in self-sufficiency.

Raised in Britain, Dee’s father was of Irish descent and had his own engineering business, while her mother ran the village shop. She left school at 16 to do a secretarial apprenticeship and worked in London as a PA until meeting Ian in her early 30s through a mutual love of motorcycles – and a dream to move to Ireland.

“In the space of six months, we got engaged in Canada, fell pregnant, got married in the UK and sold five motorbikes and two small houses before packing all our worldly goods into a van, leaving everything and everyone behind in North Essex and Suffolk,” she says.

It was on a tip-off from a local builder that Ian – who has an electrical background and now works with Intel – first came across the semi-derelict farmhouse that would become their family home, which they bought with one acre for £39,000.

The couple initially rented locally while Ian began the extensive renovations, but as months started to turn into years, they moved in to a mobile home on the site to hurry things along.

“We thought six months and we’d be in,” says Dee. “Our eldest Dan was three, Becky was about a year old and we had two dogs, cats and one bedroom – and a month later I fell pregnant with our third baby.

“We put a shower, toilet and a sink in the shed, made the kids a playroom and would collect water in a barrel from a neighbour’s farm. I remember a friend said: ‘You must just be running on love hormones because I can’t see it.’ But it was quite a happy time really and it made us really precious about life needs.”

Eighteen months later, the family of five moved into their newly renovated kitchen on Christmas Day.

“There was still no sink in here, but the cooker worked,” says Dee. “We also had the hallway finished, so Dan and Becky slept on a mattress there while Ian and I had an air bed in the kitchen and Ella was in a Moses basket on the floor next to us.

“Later, a friend put the stairs in for us and we got the first bedroom done in 2004. But it was another 10 months before we had the bathroom.”

It was around this time that Dee first began experimenting with growing her own veg, though with no formal training or even internet access, she admits to many rookie mistakes.

“I remember a friend came to visit and said: ‘You have all your veg families muddled up,’” she recalls. “I was like: ‘What are veg families?’

“But when our youngest was about to start school, I decided to do a FETAC level five course in horticulture. It was five days a week and there was a lot of theory, but I was just like a sponge.”

While Dee originally did the course to improve her own small-holding, she realised that there was an opportunity to use her experience to help other beginners and so Greenside Up was born in 2009.

“The initial plan was to go to private houses for consultations because I would have loved someone to give me an hour or two of the basic stuff and point me in the right direction,” she says.

While private consultations are still part of her work (€45/hour), Greenside Up has become much more focused on getting communities growing.

Dee has worked with 11 community gardens to date, including current projects in Callan and Freshford through Kilkenny LEADER. She has also recently started delivering a FETAC level three course in outdoor vegetable crop production at Ennisnag on Kingsriver funded by the LEC, and has worked with a variety of groups, including the Irish Wheelchair Association, with a course in growing edibles in recycled containers, ranging from water bottles to jeans.

Her website beat 3,000 nominations to be named best blog in 2013, while her latest venture involves setting up community-style gardens for workplaces, a concept she developed after taking part in the “Inspire” innovation course in Carlow IT.

“I would have been very shy when I started the business,” reflects Dee. “Even standing and talking to six people would have me shaking.

“But if you’ve got a passion, you’ll just keep at it.”

And watch that passion grow.

Getting started