You’ve made a delicious-tasting green smoothie, and you have a blender on standby for the next healthy creation. You may also have a small pile of leftovers: apple cores, some kale stems, lemon skins, and maybe some tomato stems, wilted celery, or celery ends that didn’t make the cut.
If you have a juicer at home, you can use certain leftovers in a juice. Celery ends, wilted greens, kale stems, large leafy stems, and parsley or cilantro stems are all perfect ingredients for a healthy green juice.
A green juice is different from a green smoothie. Keep some leftovers in your fridge just for juice. Once a week, make a “whatever’s in the fridge” juice. Clean out all the older fruit and veggies, and use your leftovers, too. Toss all the ingredients in the juicer, adding some ginger and lemon to brighten the taste.
If you have a compost bin, you can add your green smoothie leftovers to it. The only leftovers you shouldn’t compost are citrus peels and garlic and ginger skins. Citrus isn’t actually bad for the compost, but it takes a long time to break down.
Even if you grind it up in your blender before you toss it in the bin, it takes longer than any other food to decompose and slows down the overall compost time. The bugs and worms in the bin have a bit of an aversion to citrus, and they don’t like garlic or ginger either (because both are antiparasitic foods).
Composting provides you with rich organic matter that does wonders to improve the quality of your garden soil. Your garden plants and landscape will grow healthier and stronger thanks to the mineral-rich soil.