Tom the Apple Man & Temple Fields - Agroforestry Open Weekend 2024

We are delighted to be taking part in Agroforestry Open Weekend 2024

Our farms

We’re opening up two sites, next door to each other on Saturday from 12 until 2pm: Tom Adams Fruit Tree Nursery and Temple Fields Regenerative Agroforestry. Tom has an established site, whilst Temple Fields is just starting out.

Tom Adams Fruit Tree Nursery is a 6.5 acre certified organic Fruit Tree Nursery.

We have a diverse site of cropping areas, coppices, wildflower strips, orchard, soft fruit production and forest garden.

The crop rotation involves working with other local growing businesses that include The British Chamomile Company – Chamomile Tea, Bloomin ‘El – Cut Flowers, Bronygarth Orchard Garden – Market Garden and The British Bee Company – Honey.

Soil fertility is enhanced with the use of green manures and ramial chipped wood created from the various coppice strips on site.

The project is 5.5 years in the making and we have had 4x winter harvests of bare root fruit trees and coppiced the willow to create woodchip for the first time in winter 22/23

The different coppice areas include various types of willow selected either for high biomass yields or high salicylic acid content (as a potential for combatting scab in fruit) and a range of native broadleaf trees.

We are using forest garden principles along the east and west edges of the coppice to grow a range of soft fruit soft fruit , comfrey and mint.

The site is used for educational purposes hosting tours and courses in pruning and grafting fruit trees.

Temple Fields has been very much inspired by Tom’s work but is trying out a few more Agroforestry techniques.

We are converting a 7 acre sheep pasture into arable rotation, a fruit tree orchard, short rotation coppice and some timber production, all whilst keeping the sheep in as much of the field as we can.

We’ve designed the site in a typical alley cropping layout – inspired by the work at Wakelyns, and planted 106 fruit trees, 51 timber trees and 4 large blocks of willow and polar coppice. We have 8 quarter-acre plots where we’ll be starting an organic arable rotation, to include wheat, barley, fodder crops and fertility building leys.

We will be measuring as many aspects of the project as we can over the years and comparing to the sheep pasture baseline. In particular we will be focusing on quantifying the carbon balance of the site and trying the see whether the emissions from the animals can be offset by the carbon locked up in the trees, coppice and soil.

We’re also working with Bangor University on the national Biochar Demonstrator programme. We have applied different types of biochar to the fruit trees and will be understanding how this might improve fruit production over the years. In the future we intend to use the coppice material to make our own biochar to lock in as much carbon as possible.