Home & Garden

The down to earth engineer making

By Miranda Robertson

newsdesk@westdorsetmag.co.uk

When glamour model Katie Price, AKA Jordan, wanted a baby pink AGA for her mansion she was given short shrift by the company itself, with the ‘posh cooker’ company drily declining to help, whatever her star status. But when her agent called Bradford Peverell’s Craig Fournier he leapt into action, enlisting the help of his enameller to create the one-off appliance and his dad to help him lug it to her home. These days you can order an AGA in a rainbow of shades, but back then AGAs were the preserve of the rich and there were only a handful of classic colours to choose from. Like it or lump it. It’s typically Craig, that pink AGA. He’s always been able to spot a business opportunity, which has seen him go from a YTS AGA Rayburn apprentice on £29 a week, aged 15 with no GCSEs, to a busy trade servicing, installing and refurbishing AGAs and central heating boilers. Now he’s offering a new service – converting planet-plundering oil and gas AGAs to electric, saving owners huge amounts of money and cutting the use of fossil fuels in the process. You can save 40 per cent on your energy bills with an e-control AGA. He started Fourniers aged 25 with just £20, buying a white AGA and selling it on. “I wondered why it was so cheap,” he said. “Then when I got to this big old place it appeared they had built the house up around it and it was now only accessible through a hatch in the floor. “I had to take it apart piece by piece to get it out…” He reassembled it, gave it a good clean and the BBC bought it for £400 for a prop. “I couldn’t believe it!” said Craig. “Four hundred quid! I thought, I’m on to something here. So I bought two more and just kept going.” During his 33 years working on the cookers he’s met many A list celebrities, including Kate Moss, George Harrison and Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Mary Berry and even Theresa May… But his favourite will always be Katie Price, who had just got together with Peter Andre at the time, after meeting on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. “She was so down to earth,” said Craig. “She kept the cups of tea coming and even went to get me a sandwich. “She kept the place so hot and walked around in next to nothing. Dad being dad, he turned down the heating and told her to put some more clothes on.” However starry some of his clients might be, Craig has never forgotten what it’s like to scrape by. He often goes to places where the resident has been left with an AGA they can’t afford to replace and enjoys making them more efficient for them, and he reconditions old cookers and sells them for a fraction of the original price. Craig and his wife Jayne launched Fourniers 23 years ago. Jayne was pregnant with their son Daniel at the time – he now works for the business, and their daughter Georgia has worked on their website. Massive amounts of hard work saw the business go from sweeping chimneys in the evenings after finishing his day job with Spillers of Chard, to a large showroom in Dorchester and many employees. The Fourniers decided the overheads were affecting what they had to charge customers and these days they run a much sleeker

HOME AND THE RANGE: Craig and Jayne Fournier at home in Bradford Peverell and, below, some AGA doors

AGAs better for the planet

operation from home, to make their services more affordable. These days he’s all about the servicing and the conversions, which have become all the more urgent with biofuels making up an increasing part of central heating oil. Biofuels aren’t good for AGAs and can wreck their components. And the government aims for 70 per cent of heating oil to be biofuels by 2030. Fournier’s also replaces inefficient Rockwool with a more modern substance, which offers the same insulation of 12 inches of Rockwool in just 25mm. Craig is still, even after all these years, passionate about AGAs and central heating boilers, getting so animated as he tells me about nozzle sizes (very important) and flexi pipes (also crucial), that he reminds me of comedian Lee Evans. The nozzle thing is significant as many oil boilers have been previously fitted with a larger nozzle than its BTU rating – whether that’s due to the engineer fitting it in error or because that’s all they had in the van. A larger nozzle can triple the amount of oil used. “There was a fourbedroom house in Cattistock I went to that had a nozzle meant for a factory,” said Craig. “That meant they were burning 3,000 litres of oil instead of 1,000.” If you have a leak from your boiler or your tank, it could end up costing millions to put right, he says, especially if oil leaches into neighbouring properties, and Craig says this risk could be averted with a couple of 50p O-rings or a £12 flexi pipe. “Insurance companies won’t pay out if you haven’t kept up to date with servicing,” he said. “There was an incident in Alton Pancras which cost nearly £2million, caused by old O-rings.” He tries to look serious at this point, but he’s so ebullient it’s futile trying to be sombre. He breaks into a big smile again and starts talking about campervans. n Fourniers can be reached on 01305 262411 or by email at craig@ fourniers.co.uk. n fourniersltd.co.uk

KEEPING IT WARM: The latest forms of insulation are used and, below, conversion is recommended if you have solar panels or a wind turbine The many colours of AGA available

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36 The West Dorset Magazine, April 22, 2022 Homes & Gardens Horticulture...

...with botanist Dr Dave Aplin

Born and bred in West Dorset, Dave has worked in horticulture and botany locally and internationally, notably in Belgium, Jordan and the UAE. He brings a wealth of practical knowledge with its underlying principles to his writing

Learning to train your untamed tomatoes

Tomatoes were domesticated around 3,000 years ago in Central and South America. Yet on their arrival to our shores they were treated with great suspicion and were considered unpalatable for the next century. It wasn’t until the mid1700s that their culinary merits became widely appreciated, today they are ubiquitous and a staple food for many. Tomatoes are easy to grow in a greenhouse and can quickly become rampant. Taming their growth is key to achieving a bumper crop. Tomatoes are naturally vines with an ungainly rampant habit that responds

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Wild昀ower meadows, veg, fruit, 昀ower, new & established gardens. Fast, accurate & easy to interpret soil report within 7 days www.soilvalues.com 07598 714 082 MAJOR TOMS: Managing tomatoes can increase your crop to warm weather by accelerating growth. Success is found by preventing plants becoming a thicket of stems, because these will seldom produce quality fruit in large numbers and provides the perfect breeding ground for mildew as it cools in autumn. In my experience, the usual scenario is that plants grow increasingly quickly until they hit the greenhouse eaves. Then faced with this dilemma: do you train them up the greenhouse roof; keep removing the tops to prevent them getting any bigger; or let them flop around and do their own thing? If this sounds familiar why not adopt a different approach that increases yields with fewer plants? I grow tomatoes as double cordons, a method borrowed from training apple trees. A double cordon allows two stems of an apple tree to develop. So why not try this technique on tomatoes? When plants reach 15cm in height remove their growing tip (these rapidly root if more plants are needed). Removing the tip encourages side shoots. Select two of the strongest and remove the rest. Transfer your plant to its final position and treat each of the plant’s two stems as if they were separate plants. Tie each stem to its own cane inserted at slight angles to each other and remove all side shoots as they grow. The result will be a double-stemmed plant on a single root system. Dividing its resources in this way a shorter, more manageable and highly productive plant is produced that is unlikely to hit the roof of the greenhouse. Bush or cherry tomatoes are even more vigorous than the larger fruited types. Common advice is to leave their side shoots on to create a ‘bush’ habit. Using this method, I find plants to be productive early in the season but as their growth rate speeds up, their flowers are lost in foliage and fruit set is poor. My method for growing them is the same as for larger fruit types, only I select four stems, removing all side shoots along their length. This allows a much more manageable plant enhancing air circulation leading to better pollination and bumper crops. My plants are trained along the roof and the fruits hang like bunches of grapes. In our family we eat a huge number of tomatoes during summer, yet using the methods described I only need to grow three plants. This allows more room for other crops and maximises growing space. Why not give this method a go this year and let us know the results?

The West Dorset Magazine, April 22, 2022 37 Homes & Gardens Quiet gardens providing balm for life

By Karen Bate

newsdesk@westdorsetmag.co.uk

Tuning in to the quiet of a garden is a powerful way to tune out a busy life. Since 1992, the Quiet Garden Movement has secured a global network of hundreds of gardens whose hosts open their green spaces for people to experience the silence and spend time in prayer and contemplation. Now The Fellowship of Meditation in Dorchester will be opening their garden for Quiet Days in June for two afternoons. Fellowship office manager Becky Dovey said: “We are delighted to be joining the worldwide Quiet Garden Movement. In joining we mark the importance of silence together in natural surroundings and will be exploring the health and spiritual benefits of taking regular times of quiet in nature.” The world’s largest study into the links between rest and wellbeing, The Rest Test study published in 2016, showed that ‘being alone’ and ‘in the natural environment’ were rated in the top three most restful activities. The Quiet Garden Trust is a Christian charity, with the primary aim of nurturing low cost, accessible, outdoor space for prayer, contemplation, rest and inspiration in a variety of settings, such as private homes, churches, schools and hospitals. Founder Reverend Philip Roderick said: “The Quiet Garden Movement is about giving people permission to step back and experience a sense of stillness and wonderment. We live in a world where we are swamped by methods of communication and yet we find ourselves unable to communicate. “Silence is the missing and vital ingredient. Even as little as five minutes can be restorative and healing.” The Quiet Days are being held on Saturday May 7, from 2.30pm-4pm and on Friday, June 17 from 12 noon-4pm at Marian Dunlop House, 8 Prince of Wales Road, Dorchester, Dorset. DT1 1PW. To attend, contact Becky on 01305 251396 or fellowship. meditation@gmail.com.

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