Elemental Scientific, located in Appleton, Wisconsin, sells a decent pH meter for $34.50. You will need storage solution, and a calibration solution, so it will be around 50 dollars when you have everything you need. If the pH meter is handled gently, and the glass bulb (on the tip) is stored in the proper manner, the meter should last at least one year. Mine is two years old, and still works fine. I grow blueberries, and our tap water contains dissolved limestone, so I have to pay close attention to pH, in order to keep the blueberry beds on the acidic side.

You can get some indication of soil pH with some really simple test using baking soda and vinegar, a reaction of your soil to baking soda would indicate an acidic soil while a reaction of your soil to vinegar would indicate an alkaline soil.
Litmus paper can be somewhat more speciific, but you need to know about the range you want to test and you need to get some distilled water for this test.
You do not need to test each planitng bed seperately, unless you suspect the soil in each bed is so different that a test is required. Group all of your vegetable growing beds as one planting bed, all of your flower growing beds as one bed, and your blueberries (or other unique soil pH needing beds) as another group. Unless you suspect a really bad problem with the soil you only need to test once every 5 years or so, not each year and certainly not more often.
Any pH tester that costs less that several hundred dollars should be suspect in its capability simply because accuracy cannot be built cheaply.

These days a decent pH meter isn't all that expensive as ericwi said above. As a rule of thumb if it does not need calibration solutions it isn't any good. Generally they will tell you EC as well.

ebay is a great place to find a used laboratory pH meter. Digital is nice to have but a simple analog meter works well enough for these purposes. They can be had for less then $50 and the calibration solutions are inexpensive as well. This is the best and quickest method for accurate results.

Stay away from litmus paper. It is used primarily for monitoring a pH swing, not for an accurate pH reading.

Liquid reagent test kits are more accurate then litmus, but due to the soil tainting the color of water really are not worth it.

Go for the pH meter from ebay.

HTH

check and see if you have a county extension service (maybe at the university) cheap and usally free will give you back all kinds of info---thats how I found out my PH was 4.2.

I found an iPhone app that helped me test my soil

Here is a link that might be useful: Soil pH app