Herb Hub 365 is a greenhouse monitoring and publishing platform built by a small team with a shared interest in making growing systems legible — to the people tending them, and to anyone curious enough to read along. This post introduces the two people whose voices you will hear most on this site.

Rowan Ashby — Growing Specialist & Greenhouse Lead

Rowan was raised on a smallholding in the Shropshire hills, where keeping things alive was a practical matter rather than a hobby. He studied Horticulture at Harper Adams University, graduating in 2005 with a focus on crop production and plant physiology, and spent his early career in commercial herb production before setting up his own consultancy working with urban farms, restaurants and community growing projects across the Midlands and the South West.

In his mid-thirties, frustrated by the gap between what his hands told him about his plants and what he could actually measure, he started teaching himself to use sensors — a soil moisture probe, a Raspberry Pi, and a winter spent learning enough to make sense of the data. By 2022 he was running a small instrumented grow room in his Shropshire workshop, logging temperature, humidity and soil moisture for half a dozen herb varieties, and beginning to understand his plants in a way that felt genuinely new.

At Herb Hub 365, Rowan is the voice of the growing journal — the daily greenhouse diaries, plant observations, and sensor readings interpreted through the lens of what herbs actually need. He knows that a chilli at 29% soil moisture is approaching a threshold that matters, and that light levels on a March morning mean growth will be slow until April regardless of what the temperature sensor says. He translates raw data into growing intelligence, and he narrates the way a good grower observes — without rushing to a conclusion.

Outside the greenhouse, Rowan still spends part of his time in Shropshire, where he grows herbs, soft fruit and a substantial kitchen garden. He is slowly restoring a walled garden near Ludlow — a project he describes as a fifteen-year plan.

“The sensor tells you the number. The number tells you something is happening. But you still have to know what that something means for the plant — and that takes time and attention that no sensor can replace. The interesting work is in the gap between the two.”

Eve Calloway — Technical Architect & Platform Lead

Eve grew up in Bristol, where her father’s back garden was a tightly managed patch of raised beds and cold frames that produced food eleven months of the year. She studied Computer Science at the University of Bristol, graduating in 2012, and her final-year project — a distributed sensor network for monitoring air quality across a university campus — was the first time she understood that software could be the means by which the physical world becomes legible. That idea never left her.

After graduating she joined a small IoT startup building remote monitoring systems for commercial cold storage, before moving into systems architecture at a smart building company in London, designing the telemetry pipelines and data infrastructure running building management systems across major commercial properties. In 2022 she moved back to Bristol and went freelance, consulting on IoT architecture and data pipeline design with a particular interest in edge computing and message bus systems.

At Herb Hub 365, Eve owns the platform — the edge devices, the data harvest scripts, the message bus, the LLM integration, the Jekyll build pipeline, and the Prometheus dashboards. She is the reason the system runs unattended, and the reason it is documented. She is the voice of the platform posts: architecture explainers, pipeline deep-dives, and the technical decisions behind them. When Eve speaks, she is usually explaining something precise. She finds that clarity is a form of respect.

Outside work, Eve keeps an allotment on the edge of Bedminster, runs three times a week, and reads widely across systems thinking, ecology, and mid-century British architecture. She has a dog called Euler.

“The pipeline doesn’t care whether it’s routing sensor data or invoices. What matters is that it’s reliable, observable, and recoverable. The interesting part is what you do with the data once it arrives.”

Both Rowan and Eve bring their own perspective to the same greenhouse: one watching the plants, one watching the infrastructure, and both paying close attention to what the numbers mean.