Hi, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
I have another exciting episode for you.
So I'm here in my garden and in my garden, one of the biggest questions I get a lot is:
'Hey John, do you eat everything that you grow?'
Well I can't eat everything I grow, it would probably be almost physically impossible.
I probably could do it if I really wanted to and eat nothing else but I like to eat
a wide variety of fresh fruits and fresh vegetables and other things as well, so I don't eat everything
I grow.
But that being said I eat a good portion of what I grow.
I know some people could be saying 'Well John, in the winter time you're growing mostly greens,
do you really eat all those greens and how do you eat them?'
Well you know some people may eat greens in a salad and some people may steam them up,
cook them up like that, but that's not actually my way I like to do it.
I like to eat them in a salad and the other way to use them is to juice them!
So today is going to be an episode of me harvesting some of the greens in my garden and making
a delicious vegetable juice with it.
Now when juicing, you literally turn one leaf of broccoli for example into like that much
juice.
So while it looks like I may have a lot of food here, once you start juicing it man it
goes really quick so you could actually burn through a lot of produce really quick so it
only makes sense if you are into juicing to start growing your own greens, because then
you're going to save a lot of money.
You could buy a whole head of kale or collards or broccoli raw greens for like two, three,
maybe four bucks, depending on where you live and it's going to turn into like that much
juice, but when you grow it all, it's all free, you could juice to your heart's content
and it doesn't cost you anything, except some time and love to grow some of these plants.
So let's go around my garden and pick some of the greens we're going to be juicing today.
First we're going to pick some greens.
I've already got some broccoli greens and now some collard greens.
You can see in this front bed here, my spinach is coming up down below and I got some collards
and broccoli and kale coming up around it, so what I'm going to do is go around the bottoms
and pick some of the nice stalks like this that are blocking the spinach and blocking
the sun.
So if you are growing an understory I would highly encourage you to try to pick the stuff
that's blocking or shading out the other stuff.
Let's see here's a nice red Russian kale leaf.
Here's another large leaf here, all kinds of mixed greens.
Here's another one shading out a lot of stuff here, pick that one up.
Now when harvesting, what I'm going to do is go around to each plant and pick like one
leaf of every plant.
I'm not picking two leaves off any singular plant unless they are really shading out stuff.
I like to go around and pick some of the larger leaves.
The larger leaves are better for juicing and the smaller leaves are better for eating.
Well I think I've got a nice bunch of greens here, let's go over to the bok choy which
is actually taking over.
We've got a lot of crazy bok choy and one of my favourite things to do with the bok
choy is to actually juice it up, especially when the leaves are getting really large just
like this.
Let me show you this leaf guys, this leaf is insane.
This is a singular bok choy leaf and check it out, peekaboo, I see you!
That was the part for the kids.
But seriously this bok choy is the size of my head, it's totally amazing.
Now my favourite part of the bok chow is not the greens, it's the nice juicy stalk, it's
nice water rich, has a mild flavour, not even as strong as celery, just watery and aw, so
good!
This would make an excellent juice in the juicer, to add high water content to your
juice and also a nice flavour.
So I've got a knife, I'm just going to take out some of these flowering tops here, check
it out, we can juice all this up stem and all.
Now we want to cut this stem up, depending on the juicer you're using.
Now the cool thing is this plant here started out as one bok choy plant and as it grew larger
it threw up multiple plants.
If we harvested this young it would look like what you get in the grocery store, but since
we waited we get multiple plants.
Now let me show you guys what I mean here.
I'm going to go ahead and take a knife here and cut this stem out.
So here is one whole head of bok choy that we just cut out of the plant, but if we go
up close we can see that this one bok choy plant has made multiple heads now.
In this area here, we're just going to cut this one out.
There it is, there's another whole head of bok choy and check it out, here's even more
heads coming up, here's another head shooting off to the side, another nice head here, let's
cut this one off too.
Check it out, yet some more bok choy.
This is one plant, I got two heads and there are at least three heads on this plant so
at this point, since they are going to flower and seeding, I'm not concerned about ripping
them up, since I got so many.
Another good thing to juice is bug damaged or insect damaged leaves.
So you can see over here we got some leaves that got some damage to them and they're not
too but, but you wouldn't want to serve these to guests as a salad, they'd be going 'Man,
what's up with the Swiss cheese greens?'
But your juicer doesn't care - it'll juice these up, just fine, and provide you some
really good and nutritious juice.
In addition, the flowering tops are also very juicable, so you could obviously pick these
as broccoli, although I think this is collards.
You can just snap these guys off and use these for juicing.
Also snapping off the flowering tops will hopefully promote more leaf growth but at
this point it might be very difficult to get them coming out again.
At this point you can just keep picking them and hope for some more leaf growth before
it goes to flower.
Alright so we're just going to go ahead and pop a bunch of these guys off, the flowering
tips, and it's another good thing to add to the juice.
Another good thing I'm growing is the celeriac, the celeriac is actually celery but it's grown
for the roots so it's actually just celery root or celeriac.
But what many people don't know is that you can also harvest the tops, or just standard
celery, so we can just break off from the plant and this stuff is nice and delicate.
Now this stuff is quite fibrous, it does have a good flavour, but you may not want to eat
it.
It will give you that great celery flavour in your juice, so an excellent thing to do
with your celery root tops.
You can also actually juice the celery roots.
We're just going to grab a few more tops before we head over and juice them up.
But before I do, you may not want to juice the celery leaves, they can get quite strong.
I'm going to juice mostly just the stems without the leaves.
Now I'm ready to juice.
We have the Omega Vert 350 hd juicer.
Now this is probably my favourite juicer right now for juicing the combination that I'm going
to juice today.
Now there are many different kinds of juicers and I've got to get a plug in for my business
which is Discountjuicers.com.
On my website discountjuicers.com we show many different juicers that you can use to
juice fruits and vegetables.
Now if you juice mostly leafy greens and these green foods, you want to get what's known
as the slow rpm juicer.
I would recommend either the Omega Vert 350 hd or 330 hd or the Omega 8004 or 8006.
Each of those models and their pros and cons and I have a whole other YouTube channel that
is dedicated to sharing with you which juicer will juice certain produce items better or
worse than the others.
I like the Omega Vert because it does a wide variety of things.
It runs at a slow rpm or low rpm, only 80 revolutions per minute to ensure you get the
highest quality of juice and also it's fairly efficient at the leafy greens.
That being said, the Omega Vert, you do need to pay some attention and you do need to learn
to use it properly for it to get the best results for you.
So to use it properly, what we first need to do is prepare all our produce.
We have the bok choy here, and what we're going to do on the bok choy is we're going
to chop it up into little sections.
The Omega Vert has a problem juicing things with long strings in it.
Much like the celery, which would be a classic example.
If you pull this apart you can see the long strings which tend to get jammed up in the
machine.
So we're going to cut it up.
It's a really easy step.
I'm just getting a knife here and cutting it up into little dices, into little pieces.
So I have a nice big cutting board where I'm going to process or cut up all my vegetables
before I juice them up.
So there's all the bok choy, you can see I have a nice bok choy shredded up.
This could be a bok choy salad, or you could juice it.
The next thing we're going to do is we're going to take the celery.
Again with the celery, I don't want to take too much of the tops, so we're going to go
ahead and cut off a bunch of these tops and put them in the compost and we're going to
juice the main stalks.
Once again, very important on the celery stalks, we need to cut them into very small little
pieces so that they don't jam or clog up the juicer.
Now this step of cutting is not needed on all juicers, just the Omega Vert.
Other juicers may be a bit more forgiving, and that's one of the downsides of the Omega
Vert.
So now we've got all our celery cut up on the table.
Now I've got a big bunch of greens here and what we're going to do on the greens once
again is we're going to take a bunch of the greens and we're going to do the same thing.
Again the stalks on the greens will jam this machine so we're going to very carefully cut
them up.
Take the knife and cut them into small sections.
So I'm trying to do like 1/8th inch sections, the smaller the better, to prevent clogging
of the Omega Vert.
When we get to this part which is kind of leafy I like to just roll these up into a
big fat joint.
That's not the right green stuff.
Anyway, so once you have it all rolled up just go ahead and chop it up down the line.
Really simple and really easy, this just helps the juicer break down some of the fibre.
Alright so you can see here I have a whole bunch of shredded greens here, including the
stem and we're going to move that over here onto the cutting board.
Now we have nice little piles of the bok choy, the celery, the greens that I've freshly harvested.
In addition we're going to add a few things to the juice because juicing only greens,
that doesn't taste too good, so we want to add a lot more water content.
Of course, I could add some more bok choy in for the water content but sometimes I like
my juice a little bit sweeter, so we're going to use some apples.
We're going to pre-cut the apples up so they will fit in the machine.
Apples are very easy, and just a few simple slices will cut them up so they will fit in
the feed shoot of the machine.
The best apples for juicing are actually something like the Granny Smith.
They have a nice firm texture and help move the pulp through the machine.
Some juicers may have problems juicing apples because they can be soft and make more of
an apple sauce.
Besides apples we are also going to add some bell peppers.
These are yellow bells.
We're just going to pull off the top here and compost that and we'll just cut this up
into pieces that will fit in the machine and yes you can put the seeds and the white pith
in, the machine will extract all the nutrients from them.
Alright so now we've got a bunch of piles here on the table.
In addition we're going to put a nice English cucumber, we're going to cut off the stem
end and what I like to do is cut it in half and cut it down the middle so we have some
nice pieces of cucumber to feed into the Omega Vert juicer.
Oh, and last, we can't forget the tomato.
Now tomatoes are better blended in my opinion, especially if they are getting a bit soft,
but everyone likes that tomato juice feeling, like that V8.
I've got eight juices here, so I could call this a V8.
The juice you're making here runs at a low speed with no heat involved.
Standard V8 juice uses heat and it processed juice and it's going to taste a lot different
to fresh vegetable juice.
Once again, we need to cut the tomato so it will fit into the machine.
It's a nice juicy heirloom tomato, so we're just going to cut this in some pieces so we
can feed it into the machine.
So once we've got the produce all in little piles -- we've got the bok choy, the celery,
the greens, the apple, the peppers and the tomato and cucumber, we're going to turn the
machine on and start juicing.
It's relatively simple and really easy to use a juicer.
You can get high speed ones that run really fast, but I prefer the low speed ones.
The low speed ones are more efficient on juicing leafy greens and it's going to get a higher
extraction or higher yield and also a higher level of nutrition.
So to start juicing, we're just going to put a handful of everything in at a time.
So we're going to put a handful of the bok choy, followed by a little handful of the
celery, followed by some of those greens that I just fresh picked.
After we put all those in we always want to put in something nice and watery to help move
those greens through so we'll drop one cucumber in there.
You can see instantly that we're getting some green juice out.
Next, for sweetness we're going to drop in an apple, and also some of that pepper.
Here it is, check out some of this pulp, this is the green pulp coming out and this is actually
nice and dry.
So what the juicer does is it literally separates the juice from the fibre and it's the juice
over here that feeds you.
We are 70% water and we can only digest things that are in a liquid state and with the juicer
we take the fibre away so you get literally a shot of your garden in a glass.
So we're going to juice more of this stuff and we'll be back at you when we're done.
When you're done juicing, one of the by-products of the juicing is a whole bunch of pulp and
this pulp is excellent to use to feed the worms if you guys have worms and of course
you can also put this pulp in your compost pile.
If you're really handy and like to get every last bit out, you could also make salads with
this and do other things, cooking, put it in soups and stews, but for me, I rather feed
it to my worms or my compost bin.
So I'm not even done juicing everything that was on my cutting board and already we have
four cups of juice.
Now we're going to go ahead and turn off the machine and put the pulp catcher there and
we're going to take our juice and we're going to strain it.
Now all juicers will present some level of foam and pulp and if you don't like it just
get a little strainer.
We have a strainer basket here that we are going to sieve our juice through, just like
that.
You can see in that basket, it's just catching all the pulp and foam and all the juice it
going in the measuring cup - very simple and very easy.
If you don't mind you can actually drink all the foam and pulp as well, but I like a nice
clean vegetable juice without the pulp, but sometimes I like my pulp as well.
So you can see here we got this, and we can just shake this up a little bit to get more
of that juice in our collection cup.
Alright so here is our juice, we got three full cups of dark green vegetable juice.
Now dark green juice is one of the most nutrient rich things on the planet you can be consuming
into your body.
We know that leafy greens are really nutrient dense but when you remove the fibre the nutrients
in those leafy greens are much more absorbable and digestible.
What the juicer is doing is breaking down the hard fibre cells that we don't have three
stomachs like a cow to digest - it does all the hard work for you.
After all, we are just a juice extractor, we eat food and out one end come the solids
and another come the liquids.
The juicer will aid you in digestion and make it easier for your body to absorb the nutrition.
Wow that's actually really good, nothing better than a home grown, rock dust enhanced, mineral
rich green juice, made in your own juicer.
Hopefully this video will give you some ideas on what to do if you are growing your own
greens.
Get a juicer and start juicing them today, it tastes great and it's less filling.
Once again, it's John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, we'll see you next time, and keep on juicing!