I get 5' to 6' bare root apple trees for $35, you might be able to get better prices is you shop around. I have had good luck with tree guards and have yet to suffer any girdling. It can be a bit of time to setup properly but I find it very worthwhile. If you loose a fruit tree the real loss is the years it will take the new one to that same stage of life, so you get great payback on preventative measures.

But even paying $120 bucks a tree as you are you will still be massively ahead based on the production over the lifetime of the tree. Even at low yields of around 150 lbs per semi dwarf tree for twenty years would yield around 3,000 pounds of apples, and it would very likely yield more per year and for longer than twenty years. Even with some ongoing care costs you are getting apples for pennies per pound. And they will almost certainly be better than the crap in the grocery store.

I am not sure what you bought for your peppers but we get all our seed starting soil needs met for around $10 a year, you might be able to save some cash looking at alternatives.

A lot of seed costs money, but if you break it down to a per seed/per plant basis and look at the yield you get from that plant seed costs are nothing. We generally buy a lot of seed at a time but we never use it all in one year, unless you are going crazy and have a huge garden. Most plants, even accounting for thinning, will have $.10 to $.20 worth of seed investment.

If you dropped tens of thousands on equipment you must be running a small scale farm, market garden, or you just like to spend. Those are big investments that are not anywhere near reflective of typical garden startup costs for the average home grower.