New chicken mamas, new chicks! The farm and gardens are bursting with little peeps for Mother’s Day.

Nothing shows the unconditional love of a mother like a hen sitting on a nest for 20 straight days. She’s huffy, puffy, protective, and foregoes food, water, and stretching her legs all but once a day. Ladybug, our Cuckoo Maran, plucked her own feathers from her breast, feathered her nest, and hunkered down to make an incubator only Mother Nature could design. This update from the Cooking Light garden, just in time for Mother’s Day, shows lots of future fertilizer makers hatching now.

The ten eggs under Ladybug were a motley crew, collected from many colorful breeds in our coop. Broody hens just want eggs – any eggs –and will rear them all as their very own. In fact, two other broody hens in our coop want to mother so badly that they wrestle eggs from under each other and gently roll them back into their own nest.  It’s like watching chickens in their own Olympic competition of curling, only more interesting…

– For the full post and to see 12 photos of adorable day-old chicks, read the Cooking Light blog.