Thistle Whistle Farm
An organic farm in Hotchkiss growing 150-plus heirloom tomato varieties — the site reads like the farm's journal.
Tater Heap Technologies — website design, server mechanics, systems automation, and rural programming in the North Fork Valley, Western Colorado.
Don't install a forklift to lift a book.
No unnecessary plugins or themes. No subscriptions for basic functionality. Just raw, custom code that grows to your needs.
Websites
All of these are live. The address under each opens the site itself.
Growers & Makers
Clear Fork Cider
Small-batch cider from Paonia — the ten-bottle lineup, the method, and where to find it.
Food Fiber Shelter
A living study of food, fiber, and shelter — the three needs and the ground they share.
Gray Acres Farm
Pastured chicken, goat milk and a farm journal, moved off Squarespace with every old page address still answering.
THE PUB
Paonia United Brewing's tasting room, grown from a one-page template into a site with the barrel room's mood.
Writers & Creatives
Amy Irvine
An author site — her books, press, and a contact page drawn as a survey map that bows around the cursor.
Paonia Books
The bookstore kept its website; a new events page went up alongside it instead of a redesign.
The Smell of Adobe and Birdsong
A bilingual Persian–English poetry collection by Mohammad Ebrahim Jafari, typeset for both scripts.
Elisabeth Joy Evans
A writer and bodyworker's page, brought back from the Internet Archive after the old site went offline.
Museums & Archives
Hotchkiss-Crawford Historical Society
The valley's old photographs, set where they were taken, with a museum's catalog and its oral histories behind them.
Earlier Work
Longer-standing sites, built on WordPress and kept since.
Servers and beyond
The same hands that keep a website up keep other machinery running.
The orchard
A live feed of weather, soil, and greenhouse sensors, built on a Grafana data stack.
KVNF
A DJ streaming service for the community radio station in Paonia: a Navidrome music server under a Feishin skin.
Systems automation
Hardware put in the ground and in the house, and the logic that answers what it reads.
report to come
The Soil Doctor
Excel workbooks that turn a lab's numbers into something a grower can act on.
- InLab results — soilless, topsoil, tissue, water
- ThroughWorkbooks that sort and fold the readings, with VBA underneath
- OutA report that reads like advice, not a spreadsheet
photograph to come
The greenhouse
Field work: sensors sited, wired, and mounted, and a controller taught what to do with them. The same Campbell programming feeds the orchard's data stack upstream — one system, two sides.
- InSensors in the soil and the air — temperature, humidity, light, moisture
- ThroughA Campbell Scientific CR1000Xe, wired and programmed on site
- OutVents that open, water that runs — and the record that goes up the wire
Rural programming
Teaching a camera to count fruit before the pickers arrive.
An open-source crop-load estimation project for the peach and apple orchards of Western Colorado — computer vision put to a question growers already ask by hand, on trees they already walk. Awarded by the state; the federal funding behind it is not yet confirmed.
AWARD RECORD
- Program
- Specialty Crop Block Grant, Colorado Department of Agriculture
- Status
- Awarded by CDA — USDA funding not yet confirmed
- Term
- 2027 – 2028, planned
- Subject
- Crop-load estimation, peach and apple
- Region
- Western Colorado
- Method
- Computer vision, open source
- Licence
- licence to come
Not yet under wayPending federal confirmation
orchard photograph to come
Method
Four registers of work, built the same way.
Website Design
Sites written by hand for the people they belong to.
Server Mechanics
Hosting, domains, and mail — kept answering, and kept yours.
Systems Automation
Sensors, loggers, and workbooks set to do the watching.
Rural Programming
Software shaped to how the work is actually done out here.
Built to be owned.
Your data stays where you can reach it. Pages stay small, so they arrive even where the line is thin. Nothing underneath raises the rent. Older eyes, keyboards, and screen readers are budgeted from the first day, not fitted on the last.
Get in touch
For a new site, an addition to an old one, or a server that needs keeping: email address to come