For the raised garden, if you haven’t yet (and your locality allows it) put in a rain barrel.
I will note that my own drag chain solution on that page was just a couple of dollars (large zip ties and some molded cable covers). If money is tight, drop me a PM, I have some drag chain left over from my SO2 days which I’m never going to use and will gladly send you.
You may want to look into: https://farm.bot/ — the Opensource Ecology folks have some pretty interesting things as well.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get very far with this:
For a long while now I’ve been meaning to try to work up some sort of window garden setup which could be easily machined on a Shapeoko (or possibly even Nomad) — something else for when I retire.
Envious of the ceramics studio! I’m guessing that includes a kiln? Have you considered / is it an option to use it for metalworking?