Before you add things, have a proper professional soil test to see if you need to, and then follow the lab's instructions.

Adding stuff you don't need wastes time, money and can screw up what was nice dirt.

I probably should of separated it into different posts but once I started typing, all these questions came to mind! :) Thank you for taking the time to answer. I've been trying to add organic matter whenever I'm out in the yard. I just throw grass and weeds on whichever bed I'm looking at :). I don't even mow anymore. I just rip all the grass that's grown too large and throw it on the nearest bed. I have a worm bed that has composty stuff in it but I don't know if I should add quite that much per bed as it may be more potent than compost. I was thinking I'd just leave some worm compost in each of the holes prior to transplanting and mound all my melons and squashes with it. I did buy about 10 yards of organic compost last year and have used it on many of the beds I've made. I do have almost 40 beds though so it didn't go as far as I wanted. I was hoping not to have buy so much this year so maybe I can go with just a couple yards and add that to the beds that didn't get as much last year.

It sounds like I'll have to amend the fertilizer recipe a bit to counteract the loss of N while there's still plenty of P to go around. Maybe adding just soybean/alfalfa later in the season and spraying with fish/seaweed emulsion every other week might help. I definitely have getting a soil test on my to-do list but I might need several as my yard varies quite a bit. Some places are just rock, some is clay so hard it seems like rock and some of it is like a fluffier clay with few rocks. I'm a little terrified the test will come back saying I shouldn't even try to garden in this soil! That'd be so discouraging I'd almost rather not know! I know it's silly but that's mainly what's held me back, that and I'm really bad about penny pinching. I could spend 10$ on a soil test or $10 on a half yard of compost and every time I go with the compost :) I have a neighbor who does a lot of hydro/aeroponics and I think he's got some nice at-home tester that I could use to get a rudimentary idea of what's in the soil but not as accurate as sending it off. In the mean time, it sounds like this years garden will be a good experiment that, with any luck, will pay off :)

One thing I would suggest is woodchips. I have subscribed to a few different youtube gardening channels and one of them is a guy from the desert of Arizona called VeganAthlete. The woodchip mulch he uses cuts down on water by a lot.

Well that's awesome because I have wood chips! Yards and yards of them! I actually used them between my garden beds so I don't have to worry about grass or weeds shading out my veggies. Unfortunately, I don't have the unlimited supply I used to have but I still have a huge amount I can spread around some more. I'll call around some tree trimmers and see if they are interested in a free spot to drop piles of wood chips, that's how I got them last time but the guy decided to go into a different business so I'm not getting any new deliveries. I'll look on youtube to see how that guy is using his, I'm assuming you wouldn't want them directly on the gardens but maybe using them as mulch in the garden isn't so bad during july/august/sept. when we get absolutely no rain what-so-ever. I've used them as mulch for my fruit trees but have been careful keeping them away from the trunk, I also laid them on the high end of the property near the house to keep some water away from the foundation, not sure how well that'll work but at the time I had a lot and it looked nice spread out there. I have looked into hugelkulture also but with the ground I have I'd need a bobcat to get any further than 3 feet down.

You can use wood chips as mulch directly. If you can get them during the growing season, they have a pretty good amount of nitrogen and will actually get steamy if left in a pile by themselves. Try your electric utility, they either have their own crews or they have a contractor, and in some places you can get on a customer list to have them dumped free. Can't hurt to ask.

As for the cost of a soil test, I understand the reluctance to spend on it, but you also have to consider what you're spending on all that alfalfa meal, bone meal, Epsom salts and all that, for 40 beds. Trust me, the test will pay for itself. The only potential problem is that all your beds may not be the same if they've been amended very differently over time. But if they're all fairly much the same (don't worry about small differences), take a composite sample of a bunch of them, mix it well, and test that. At least it will give you an average baseline to work from. Or, if you have different groups, maybe select a subset and do a sample on that group. Don't bother getting a test for N, it changes seasonally and it will usually come up 'deficient'. Get P, K, micronutrients (Ca, Mg etc., they'll know), pH, organic matter. Usually these will be available all in one package. Tell them it's for garden soil.