This work studies the effects of homogeneous chemical reaction and thermal radiation on coupled heat and mass transfer by free convection from a surface embedded in a fluid-saturated porous medium. Two different cases of thermal and solutal boundary conditions, namely the prescribed surface temperature and concentration (PSTC) case and the prescribed heat and mass fluxes (PHMF) case are considered. The governing boundary-layer equations are formulated and transformed into a set of non-similar equations. The resulting equations are solved numerically by an accurate and efficient implicit finite-difference method. The obtained results compared with previously published work and found to be in excellent agreement. A representative set of results is displayed graphically to illustrate the influence of the radiation parameter, chemical reaction parameter and the permeability of the porous medium on the velocity, temperature and concentration fields as well as the local skin-friction coefficient, local Nusselt number and the local Sherwood number.