R/dplyr : merge and extract count totals of repeated string values within a single column/create new column with the total for each unique string

Question

In R, how do you merge(and get a count of) identical string values in a single column (so there's only one of each) and put the correlating count of those string values into a new column? I'm still relatively new, so any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks!

EX:

input_data = data.frame(fruit = c(apple, apple, orange, orange, orange, banana))

desire_output = data.frame(fruit = c(apple, orange, banana),
                           count = c(2, 3, 1))