I haven’t been juicing for that long, but during my fast, I learned a few tricks that made the whole process a lot easier and enjoyable.

Save the plastic bags that you get when you buy produce and use them to line the ‘hopper’ of the juicer. The hopper is the bucket part that pulp ends up in. Cleaning juicers sucks, so make it easier by lining with the produce bags. Another bonus is that you can then tie off those bags when you throw them away to prevent fruit flies. 2 apples, 1/2 a lemon, and a bit of ginger make just about anything taste good. It won’t cover up the taste of celery very well, but everything else yields to the sweet and tart flavors. I prefer red delicious apples. When cleaning the dish or basket (the mesh part that strains the juice from the pulp), hold it directly under the water faucet and scrub in a circular motion with a short bristled brush. The water flow is necessary, otherwise you just mush everything around and it take 5x as long to clean. If the bristles are too long, it just won’t work very well. You need short lil’ scrubbing circles. Also, be gentle with that mesh, as the basket on my juicer seems a tad fra-gee-lay. (it must be italian) Blueberries, blackberries, etc make a mess. It’s hard to dump them all down the shoot and cover the hole with the plunger before the blade obliterates them and makes bits of purple berry go everywhere. I started just covering the hole with my hand as I drop them in. Garlic sucks. I tried to make V8 juice based on some recipe I found online. There was very limited success. Garlic is good for you, but juiced garlic is very potent. I’d say like 1/4 clove or so for a quart is plenty. Either way, it’s definitely not 2 cloves. Go easy with the hot stuff. I’m a fan of spicy food and can handle a decent amount of heat, but for a quart of juice, I’d go with a 1/3 of a jalapeno, max. Something about the extracted oil makes the heat go a lot further than if you just ate the pepper outright. Quart sized mason jars work great. My juicer didn’t come with a receptacle for the juice, as some others do. I happen to have a few dozen mason jars in my apartment for no ulterior purpose whatsoever, so I started using them to catch the juice and they work great. I use the quart sized widemouth jars and the Mean Green juice recipe fills them up with just enough room for 4 ice cubes. Watermelon flavor is stronger than you’d think. I figured I’d use watermelon as an easy way to add some volume to a juice, but watermelon flavor is always detectable. It’s not like cucumber where the flavor just disappears in the face of nearly any other vegetable. Basically, if you add watermelon, you’ll taste it. It’s yummy though so whatevs.

That’s all I can think of for now. If you have any other tips, please leave them in the comments.