HI. I have a book that says juice vegetables but eat fruit - apart from adding apple to make some juices more palatable. Crapple base is good for most things, tried to juice kale and it was very difficult. I'm keen to do more juicing though and looking out for recipies that actually taste nice.

The key to keeping the price down is to buy what is in season locally. I shop at a local produce stand that gets the majority of its produce from local farms. Granted I live in Florida so that makes it somewhat easier to get produce all year long however, we have growing seasons too and they do get imported produce at times, that is the expensive stuff. And of course when shopping at a regular grocery store look for the sales. It is hard to buy large quantities of produce even if you have the storage because of the short shelf life but, if you don't have one, I would invest in either a Food Saver or Seal-a-Meal vacuum seal system because you can vacuum seal batches of produce (even soft things like tomatoes as there is a manual button to stop the vacuum and seal before it squishes) and it extends the life of the produce in the refrigerator but at least a week.

Hope that helps.