Should I leave the fallen apples under the tree or clear them up? I get contradictory advice every autumn.

Both neighbours are right about different fruit, and the distinction is whether the apple is rotting or diseased.

A sound apple that fell because it was ripe, and is now breaking down on the ground, is compost with extra steps. It feeds soil life, birds and insects eat it, and it carries no particular risk.

An apple that fell because it was diseased is a different object. Brown rot in particular overwinters in fruit — including fruit that dries out and stays hanging in the tree, which is the part people miss. Leave those and you are storing next season's infection at the base of the tree, ready to splash up in spring rain.

So the sorting rule is: sound windfalls can stay, visibly rotten or mummified fruit goes, and anything still attached and shrivelled should be picked off and removed too. That single distinction resolves most of the argument, and it is why two experienced gardeners can disagree honestly — they are each picturing a different pile.

On question 2, honestly: barely, and not in the way people imagine.

Apples are mostly water and sugar. The mineral content is small, and what returns to the soil from a season of windfalls is a modest amount of potassium and very little nitrogen. You will not fertilise a mature tree with its own fruit.

What it does do, which is worth more than the nutrients, is feed the soil ecosystem — worms, fungi, beetles — and add a little organic matter. That is a genuine benefit and it is a slow, cumulative one, not a feed.

So "it feeds the tree" is wishful. "It feeds the soil under the tree, slightly, over years" is accurate and still a good reason to leave the sound ones.

The middle position that works, and what makes the rat argument real or not:

Leave sound fruit, but not in a heap, and not against the trunk. Scattered fruit that is accessible to birds and dries or breaks down quickly is not a rat problem. A pile is — it is food plus cover, which is the combination that matters. Rats want somewhere to be while they eat.

Keep the base of the trunk clear regardless. Fruit against bark holds moisture on it all winter and that is its own problem, separate from disease and rodents.

Take the worst of it away in autumn, then stop worrying. You do not need to clear every apple. You need to remove the diseased ones and avoid creating a heap.

If you have more sound fruit than the ground can absorb, the other honest option is to pick it before it falls and give it away. A tree that drops that much is usually producing more than the ground under it can process.

One thing worth knowing for the disposal half: diseased fruit is generally not something to put on a home compost heap.

Home heaps rarely get hot enough for long enough to kill the pathogens reliably, so you risk spreading it back onto the garden with the finished compost. Council green waste is composted at industrial temperatures and does deal with it.

Also relevant if you keep chickens, which many people with an orchard do: they will happily eat windfalls, and that solves both problems at once — though not the mummified ones, which should still just go.