The Codling Moth fun park

It’s been a bumper year for top and soft fruit in 2015 and Adrian Barlow from British Apples and Pears Limited says it will be the best for apples for 20 years.

Take one look at the apple tree that dominates the bottom of my garden and you can see why. It is laden with big, bright, shining apples. Apparently the cool nights we’ve been having helps turn the skins red, and the summer-halting deluge of rain we’ve experienced in the last two weeks has bulked them up.

The sheer ‘muscle gain’ of this tree has been particularly impressive. If I were the tree’s publicist (which is a Terry Pratchett kind of concept) I’d be complaining about the fact that this photo was taken over three weeks ago and that since then, the tree has gone on to bigger and better things. Our neighbours have been viewing it enviously, it really does look like someone’s gone mad in Photoshop and cloned red apples across the whole tree.

The apples are so large that should three of them fall simultaneously, then it would register on some kind of seismology device at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington.

However these apples are show ponies.

They may look beautiful, but bite into one and you get a mouthful of tasteless damp pap. The initial reaction of chomping into one of these fruity basketballs is like that of the average toddler given a spoonful of Cow & Gate yuk. Yes, it gets spat out at a rate of knots.

And that’s one of the virginal apples. Half of the tree is a thriving ecosystem for every insect that ever wanted to burrow into an apple and reproduce. Bite into one and you get more than a Kinder Surprise. There’s a tell-tale brown passageway from the stalk down to the central core where all kinds of dirty deeds look to have taken place.

This is not so much an apple tree, more like a Codling Moth fun park.

They say that in the rain forest there are whole ecosystems in the canopies of trees, with creatures that live their entire lives up there and never come down. And it’s very much the same with this apple tree. Half-hollowed out apples come tumbling out – hollowed out by what? Wasps, birds, endomorphic earwigs?

There’s a lot going on up there and even though we find the apples inedible, there’s a lot of God’s creatures who don’t agree. They don’t share our preference for Marden Russets which are really hard for insects to get into, the Stonewall Jackson of top fruit.

2015 has certainly been a bumper year for apple-loving insects in our garden, but having such an engine room for apple-inhabiting fauna means that the apples we really like – such as braeburns and a brilliant family apple tree that survived a move from Hinchley Wood – get pestered to death by the pests.

The nasty surprise coming our tree-dweller’s way is that in January or February a space will appear where once there was an apple tree. My patience has run out. I predict that 2016 will be a bumper year for apple logs. And at least it means I won’t have to prune it again…