Gardening report - aka how to garden for little to no cost!

As part of our grocery stretching campaign, I've started a garden. It's been a very long process - we started with making compost a year ago, and I've only recently begun to plant things. I'll briefly outline what we've done so far:

• Composted any and all compostable items over the last year. First we started with a trash can compster which worked well, but it was hard to turn the compost so I switched to a layer system in the bed. It is amazing how much it breaks down - I can have the bin full, and in just a month or two it has broken down into barely any at all. 
• Our garden beds are a mix of things, all gleaned from bulk pickup. Our main bed was originally a twin size bed frame that the neighbors across the street tossed out 2 years ago. Since it was built as a platform bed style, it works perfectly as a 6ft by 3ft garden bed. Currently this is our main compost bin as we try to fill it with compost for planting. Right now it is stuffed to the gills with lawn clippings from when we finally mowed our back lawn a month ago. 
• Also in the garden bed lineup are 10 tires of assorted sizes, also gleaned from bulk pickup this year. They range from a tractor tire {soon to become dd's garden bed} to standard car and truck tires, which we stack for potato planters. I have seed potatoes ready to plant in these this week as a late crop. These are all lined up on one end of our patio, so that as they grow they will also provide shade for the patio this summer. 
• One large planter {the type used for trees in nurseries}. Currently this has my volunteer potatoes in it - I had potatoes that came up in the compost bin from soft potatoes I had chunked up for compost, so I picked out the best 4 plants and planted them in this bin in a mix of hay {dried cut lawn grass} and decomposed hay / soil. So far 3 are growing very nicely!
• One Chinese plum tree that a friend brought me. Right now it's about a foot tall, so I'm not expecting fruit anytime soon. 

I'm hoping to buy a couple bags of compost at the store soon, so that I can layer it on top of the big bed to go ahead and plant this month. I've also saved several cardboard egg cartons, to use as seed starters with a small amount of compost for the other crops I plan to grow in the big bed this summer. I'll hopefully be starting on that this week as well, if I can find my seeds in my storage room.