Beets are yummy!

When I attended the Michigan Fiber Festival last month, one of the Icelandic Sheep breeders recommended giving sheep beet pulp as a healthy treat . Well, it just so happens, I have beets in my garden the size of cantelopes, so I certainly have enough to share! Here is a picture of the half I didn't feed to them next to an apple just for perspective.


I ran chunks of the beet and some old grocery store carrots that were in the frig thru the grater in my food processor and made a big bowl of shredded beets/carrots. I took it out to the sheep and put it in the trough I use for grain. There were 4 or 5 of them that absolutely LOVED it! Bianca, the white sheep in the middle of this picture, was the most enthusiastic about their yummy treat. Her chin was all red when she finally came up for air.
Here you can see in the background the girls who didn't find the beets as appetizing.

The girls didn't quite finish it all ... there was a lot of it!! So I took the left overs to the lambs and they weren't as enthusiastic, but they did manage to finish what was left over the course of the day.
Beets are good for people too! And if you've only ever had a canned beet and think, "YUK!" then I encourage you to purchase a bunch of fresh beets in the produce department. Trim the tops, boil for 10 -15 minutes and enjoy. They are very sweet and butter tasting. I promise you will think differently about beets. I also like to top a toss salad with some raw grated beets.

From The World's Healthiest Foods here are some of the benefits of beets:

These colorful root vegetables contain powerful nutrient compounds that help protect against heart disease, birth defects and certain cancers, especially colon cancer.

The pigment that gives beets their rich, purple-crimson color-betacyanin-is also a powerful cancer-fighting agent. Beets' potential effectiveness against colon cancer, in particular, has been demonstrated in several studies.

Helps reduce total cholesterol and triglycerides and increase HDL.

Beets' Betaine Helps Lessen Inflammation

People whose diets supplied the highest average intake of choline (found in egg yolk and soybeans), and its metabolite betaine (found naturally in vegetables such as beets and spinach), have levels of inflammatory markers at least 20% lower than subjects with the lowest average intakes, report Greek researchers in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Detopoulou P, Panagiotakos DB, et al.)