After the winter of 2011/12 I confidently predicted, to anyone who would listen, that due to the long cold winter we were bound to see a bumper apple harvest that autumn. And so we did. My predictions however this year for a poor crop proved to be not quite so accurate. Clearly there is more to this business than I realise, but I am not complaining. It has been a fantastic harvest and I have done my best to keep up by eating at least one a day and turning the rest into puree, pie and frozen slices.

The English took the humble apple to heart a long time ago and proclaimed it their own. The Germans may have their Strudel and the Americans may have their pie, but we have crumble. Case made. Apples have indeed been cultivated here for hundreds of years and become embedded in our culture. The word greengrocer is derived from a medieval variety of apple and countless apple-centric sayings have made their way into our everyday language. And of course it was the apple that showed Newton how gravity worked.

But the apple is a truly global fruit and away from these shores others may see the crown of top apple nation as rightfully being theirs. The Chinese are the world’s biggest producers (we are ranked a lowly 38th), New Zealand orchards produce many times more apples per acre than we do because their climate is so perfect (so much so that an English apple bought in a UK supermarket will have a higher carbon footprint than a Kiwi one bought in the same supermarket) and Turkish apple growers are without doubt closer geographically to the original wild apple trees (which came from the region of Central Asia that is now Kazakhstan). And of course long before our wild forebears had ever heard of the apple it was getting a bad name for itself in the Garden of Eden.

It is possible though that no other nation has produced quite so many different varieties of apple and certainly none other has distinguished between eaters and cookers in quite the same way (and then proceeded to categorize cookers so precisely according to the manner in which they cook – yes, apparently Bramley is not the only cooker!). The National Fruit Collection in Kent has over 2000 varieties though barely a dozen can be found in our shops, even at this a time of year. There are however many heritage varieties now available at specialist fruit nurseries, with some suitable for every region of the country, and their often superior taste and texture make them worthy of a place in any garden. So why not try finding an Apple Day near you this month to sample some fruit, before selecting one or two varieties to plant this winter.