Vintage Horticultural and Garden Machinery Club

The VHGMC always has it’s AGM on the second weekend in March. Memberships run from 1st January through to 31st December, so we can’t have the AGM much later in the year because it would be largely meaningless. Similarly, if we had it in January then it may even be snowed off, so the compromise is March.
This year we decided to re-visit the old formula of hiring a room at a popular venue and allowing free entry to the venue for all members attending the meeting. I think most of you will know of the British Motoring Heritage museum at Gaydon which was originally put together by British Leyland; it now has been expanded to cater for all British makes and it really is a museum with no equal anywhere in the world.
Many of the exhibits are prototypes or one-offs made for a specific purpose, interspersed with production cars from all eras. It really is a venue that appeals to all walks of life with exhibits from Jaguar and Land Rover standing side-by-side with cars from Austin, Morris, Triumph and MG to name but a few. Of particular interest to myself was the display of MG record-breaking cars which rose to fame in the 1930’s and into the 1950’s; one of these was EX135 which took speed records in the 350cc class, 500cc, 750cc, 1100cc and 1500cc by ingenious use of a single, six-cylinder engine. To achieve the smaller capacities it was run with just two pistons, then three, and to achieve the record in the 1500 class it was bored out to just over the 1100cc size, so it was sacrificing nearly 400cc’s and it still achieved over 200mph!
 Everyone attending showed their appreciation at the end of the meeting, and one or two even brought machines to swap in the car park. It looks like next year’s venue may be already sorted out!

After a year of planning, head scratching and considering many many options available, the new VHGMC website is here! This has been no easy task, in order to do everything that’s currently required, the website brings to you more options than ever before and makes this the one-stop place for all things relating to vintage horticultural machinery. 

Did I say one-stop? Well this is the place to organize your machinery photos or indeed videos all in your own galleries, create a group of friends, and also keep a timeline of what you are doing with your hobby. You can send messages to friends, comment on their updates, discuss topics in the forum and many other options. This keeps all your hobby related information in one easy place to share – rather than having it scattered across many website services. 

We have also added news articles to the site, so if you have something of interest them we can put it on there for you. And if you are wanting something extra to read then back issues of The Cultivator are available to download free for paid members.

Currently we have pushed the  technology as far as we can, in fact there are a couple of items I wanted to do but the solutions aren’t there yet! Although we do have many other things to add and try and you may notice some tell-tale signs on the site.  

If you have any questions then you can contact me at @alan (how brilliant is that? Just click on @alan and then click on ‘Private Message’  to the right of my avatar picture) or through the ‘contact’ page, there’s also some info about the website at tractorbox too. <