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became a Scottish Branch Committee Member in 2014 and is an extremely busy and active member from working with our sponsors and partners to running
the 200 club. Gareth was formally given the role of Scottish Branch Sponsorship officer in 2015 due to the amount of work that he does in this area and continues to hold this officer position. Gareth’s efforts have resulted in the Scottish Branch Championships being almost self-sufficient financially, allowing the Branch to commit funds to other charitable objectives. Gareth became an NVS qualified judge in 2003 and judges at many local shows plus
has judged both Northern and Scottish Branch Championships. At National level, Gareth has been a Scottish Branch Trustee rep from 2016 to 2022 and was formally made National Sponsorship Manager
in 2019. Gareth’s strong people skills in working with our sponsors and partners has ensured the NVS members benefit from free seeds and extra sponsored competitions. Gareth is also well known and respected within the commercial side of growing and has recruited many members from that area.
Scottish Branch
Fiona Shenfield
In 2012 Fiona became Committee member and took on the role of Scottish Branch Secretary. In 2016 she picked up the role of Scottish Branch Newsletter Editor
and is a regular contributor of the SV Magazine at both Branch and National level. Fiona has supported and helped create veg presentations from 2009 to current day working to support many of our lecturers. Fiona has travelled to various DAs around the country supporting her partner Ian Simpson with his various presentations. She has worked on the Scottish Branch displays at Gardening
Scotland and supported the recent new Scottish Garden Show, both creating the displays and helping on the stand providing veg growing guidance. At National level, Fiona revamped and maintained the NVS Directory from 2017 and 2020. In 2018, she developed the NVS compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) which became law in 2018 whilst supporting the re-vamp of the Judges Guide. In 2020, Fiona took on board, under the lead of Ian Stocks, the creation of the new NVS membership system (linked with white Fuse web site) The Development was approved to go ahead in Jan 2020 and go live approved in Nov 2020. This activity included combining and cleansing the 5 branch membership spreadsheets with the NVS Directory plus training and supporting the Branch Membership Secretaries.
Scottish Branch
Ian Stocks
Ian joined the NVS in 1986. Ian took on the role of Scottish Branch Treasurer for 9 years until 2002 and again from 2010 to 2013.
In 2013, Ian took on the role of Scottish branch Chair, a role he continues to hold today. A progressive and active Chair,
Ian has taken the Scottish Branch from strength to strength, developing contacts through Premier Hydroponics, pushing boundaries in technology and actively supporting DA’s. Ian drove the creation on the Exhibition growing booklets in 2016, to help capture top growers knowledge and share, writing one himself on growing Long carrots. These are now within the library
in PDF for all within the NVS to share. Always at the centre of every project, Ian’s drive is infectious, whether it’s setting up
a garden visit, coming up with ideas for
a display theme, leading the team when hosting the National Championships, working with Premier Hydroponics to grow
peppers for our branch members and trial numerous veg types using different new growing methods. Ian became a qualified NVS judge in 1996 and has judged at
the Scottish branch championships on numerous occasions and at the National Championships twice. As Scottish
branch Chair, Ian led the committee into
a modern approach to judging at shows allowing judges to compete as well as judge. This has worked very well for the last 3 years for the Scottish Branch. Ian has lectured throughout the country for NVS DA’s on numerous occasions , plus Medwyn’s Master Class and also initiated and organised the NVS Winter Zoom talks through Covid to support our members.
At National level, Ian has been a Scottish Branch Trustee rep from 2011 to 2016. During this time, Ian was also the NVS Web Master from 2012 to 2014 and volunteered to work and develop the web site and forum. Ian became the National Vice Chair in 2018 and created a strong driving force for Sandra Hall and the Trustee team
going forward. Ian also managed our Pay Pal account from 2018 for membership payments. Ian was instrumental in the research, creation, and development, structure and maintenance of the new/ current NVS Web site in conjunction
with White Fuse. The development was approved to go ahead in Jan 2020 and go live approved in Nov 2020. Ian’s work in this area included design and development of the site, creation and trialling of all membership payment activities (including transfer from Pay Pal to card payment,
plus transfer of the previous “manual direct debit “ to the new automated Direct debit system. Ian set up the structure of the site with news, events, resources, and library and successfully supported the development of this new system within a much-reduced acceptable budget.
Amazon smile
You may not know that the NVS
took up the opportunity to receive donations via AmazonSmile back
at the end of 2020. In doing so
this means that for anyone who is shopping via AmazonSmile, if you select the National Vegetable Society as your chosen charity, then every time a purchase is made, Amazon will give 0.5% of the net purchase price (excluding VAT and other shipping fees) of eligible AmazonSmile purchases to the National Vegetable Society.
Each Quarter, Amazon will send a donation from those purchases directly to the NVS each quarter (unless it’s less
than £5, in which case
it would send annually).
Our first donation of
£10.55 was received back
in February 2021 and at
time of writing this article,
we have now received a
total of £87.95 which goes
towards the running costs
of the NVS and every little helps. A big thankyou to those who are supporting the NVS in this way (28 people to date).
If you are going to do some Amazon shopping soon, dare I say...with Christmas on the horizon, (usually via amazon.co.uk), then all you need to do instead, is to type smile.amazon.co.uk on your web browser instead. This will log you into smile.amazon.co.uk , where you can select the National Vegetable
Society as your chosen charity. If you switch to smile. amazon you will still see exactly
the same data and information, account, previous orders & wish lists.
The selection of products that Amazon offers is identical, as are the prices.
Note; even if you didn’t wish to choose the NVS as your chosen charity, there are hundreds of charities there to select from who could benefit from one small change, it’s your personal choice and you would be helping out.
Doing these costs, you nothing, just a few seconds to type and log into smile.amazon.co.uk.
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