Honeycrisp! my new "farm", and keeping clean and busy. (first lemmy post)

This is my first post on lemmy!

I'm new to this whole gardening thing. I got clean off hard stuff about a year ago, and have been adding to my "farm" in the yard. My SO is super happy in the dirt too, she's realizing how green her thumb is, and it's extremely therapeutic for both of us.

So far I have 4 apple trees. Golden delicious, 2 granny Smith, 1 honey crisp. Two of them are new this year. The other two I planted in a drug induced haze 😅. They had rust and wooly aphids last year, but after some preventative measures this year I'm all good besides the few aphids. Luckily there's an abundance of lady bugs here, and neem oil seems to do the trick.

The raised beds I put in over the course of this past week. It's just a top soil/compost mix. Right now I just have grape tomatoes in there. We have carrots, broccoli, spinach, romaine, cat nip, and kale all sprouting from seeds were gonna place in there as well.

Besides those things we have some potted fruits: blueberry, raspberry, grape, strawberry as well as potatoes all growing really well right now.

My next step is to map out the raised beds and plant the sprouts. Then I'll see about maybe transferring some of the potted stuff in there as well. We definitely have to figure out a more permanent fencing solution too, and something for over top cause the birds have been eating each berry one by one right when it ripens. Lol oh well.

I'd also like to get some more local plants, especially pollinators, elsewhere in the yard, along the tree line, everywhere. I live in NE PA if you have any reccs!

Just realized we have a spotted lantern fly nymph issue on the raspberry. Sucks, they are new to the area /: but neem oil, dawn, apple cider vinegar all kill on contact iirc.

Thanks for reading my attempt at adding more content to lemmy! (:

If you have any tricks of the trade, please, I'm all ears!