Systems that feed each other.
The bees came first. Then the question wouldn't leave: what else could a small operation grow if the growing itself got smarter? These are the living systems that question keeps producing.
Aquaponics
A closed-loop system: fish feed the plants, plants clean the water, and the whole thing either balances or it doesn’t — there is no half-working aquaponics. No synthetic fertilizer, no pesticides, because introducing either would kill the fish within hours. The loop keeps you honest.
Right now the system is deliberately small: a 30-gallon tank in the basement, goldfish and parsley, running while the sensor stack gets hard-soldered on the bench. The instrumented 120+ gallon build moves into the garage this fall — a bigger loop, real telemetry, and the room to let the data get interesting.
The robot farmer
A CNC gantry over a growing bed — seeding, watering, and tending run by machine, on the same instinct as everything else here: instrument the system, then let it learn its own plot.
The FarmBot is built. It doesn’t drive its track cleanly yet — that’s the current learning curve — so it’s a bench project until the motion’s sorted. The plan is to fold it into the garage aquaponics build (the 4×8 tent) and let it tend what grows there.
The infusion craft
Some of what we grow ends up in the kitchen. Infusing honey with herbs and botanicals is a craft problem — flavor, ratio, timing — and we treat it like any other experiment here: small batches, careful notes, honest failures.
First in the beds are lavender and mint — grown to cook and infuse with, kitchen-side, nothing more clever than that.