Happy to collaborate where possible. Looks like the first thing I need to do is update my spare BBB and look into Node-Red – the Big Timer looks interesting. I will start a separate project thread for yet another greenhouse project and link to this post (in the next couple of days). Node-Red and MQTT would definitely be better than the way I am pushing data around now. It has been very interesting Googling information on the components you mention.
There was one interesting hit for ESP-01 and MQTT (and Arduino) that might be of some interest:
There was this other item that an example of a Spark-Core with MQTT and Node-Red:
Definitely, one step at a time. Rob