Hello, I'm Chilli-head

Prompted by Compostwoman, a bit of my background.

I'm a Chilli-head living on an ordinary street on the edge of an ordinary small Bedfordshire town, in an ordinary house, with a slightly smaller than average family (DW+DS). I have a day job, and my background is in robotics and automation.

You may be wondering by now what I'm doing here . Well, I, my father (and his father) are/were amateur kitchen gardeners, and DW is from a family of beekeepers. Mucking around on a farm was a part of my childhood, and in the early 90's I moved from industrial automation to agricultural, taking a job at a government agricultural research institute. With my colleague, we have been working since on applying automation to reduce / replace agrochemical use, either by careful targetting, or by automatically guiding mechanical weeders.

Just as things were looking good, with EU herbicide bans making what we do look more interesting, the research institute collapsed around us. Not willing to give up, we set up a small company (I'm the H in THT Ltd), and are still doing the same sort of thing 5 years on. One of the most inspiring projects to me involved growing a field of wheat at Sheepdrove organic farm; my colleague drilled it, we both had a go at tractor hoeing it, then it was harvested, milled, analysed, baked, and served as bread rolls with an (organic !) vegetable soup for lunch after the final project meeting. So good to see the whole cycle from seed to plate.

I have a small veg patch in the garden with a greenhouse of which one side is devoted to tomatoes, the other to (surprise !) chillies and peppers. I also have an allotment. I find growing my own helps me to know what I'm talking about when I'm with commercial growers, but also I like to see what I ideas I can take from commercial growing and use in my garden.

I hate to waste things, and get a kind of twisted gratifiction out of fixing things or making useful things from junk.

Oh, and I DO like slow food. And most things chilli laden ...

Thank you very much for that CH, it all helps , to get a mental image of what our various backgrounds and interests are.

And your day job sounds fascinating, as well .

Most interesting Chilli

HIya,
good to meet you - sheepdrove is a fascinating project and your work too.