Vegetable juice

Both of us – cook and gardener – have worked extraordinarily hard over the past 30 years to build a home, a family, a garden and the businesses that support them.

Unsurprisingly then, we look forward to an active old age spent in the home and garden with the grandchildren around us, rather than endless hours in doctors’ waiting rooms and lying in hospital beds for the infirm.

If the secret to nutritious food and a healthy old age is indeed hours of  exercise tending plants grown in a healthy soil, then one of the great elixirs of such a life is vegetable juice derived from those same plants harvested from such rich soils.

Ingredients are simple – lettuce, celery and  carrot as the base, and apples for sweetness and their extra juice. Berries are added in season, along with whatever other vegetables and soft fruit are about and in surplus.

As always, it’s worth buying a high-quality juicer that will be good for many years of trouble-free operation; ours is a three-year old Sunbeam DA-900 screw-type that separates juice from fibre with ease. The fibre goes off to the compost heap and will be returned in that way to the soil.