Ossipee Hill Farm & Observatory

Ossipee Hill Farm & Observatory Ossipee Hill Farm is a forage yourself and pay what you want farm in Southern Maine.

05/31/2026

Happy !
We are seeing thousands of little white flowers scattered through the whole forest. So excited to have you come and in less then a month!!! Share with all your friends!

If it’s not all gone today, let me know if you’d like to be next on the asparagus list. Still seeing more crowning up! I...
05/17/2026

If it’s not all gone today, let me know if you’d like to be next on the asparagus list. Still seeing more crowning up! I’ve foraged over 30 pounds so far. and I planted the crowns we are harvesting from in 2022ish. We’ve planted thousands more crowns over the years that we can’t touch yet. So, our yield should multiply quite a lot in the coming years! Maybe even you forage asparagus one day. -Gwendolyn

First harvest of the 2026 season! If you are interested in some asparagus in exchange for a donation to the observatory,...
05/07/2026

First harvest of the 2026 season! If you are interested in some asparagus in exchange for a donation to the observatory, let me know. I will be harvesting more over the next few weeks.
-Gwendolyn

05/05/2026

A new supernova has just occured in a "near-by Galaxy", designated SN 2026kid. It was discovered on April 22, 2026, in the Splinter Galaxy (NGC 5907). This Type II supernova is located in the constellation Draco, roughly 46–50 million light-years away. It appears as a bright spot within the edge-on spiral galaxy's dust lane.

Look for the star like object just above my mouse cursor, that is our brand new supernova!

Flower Moon Update The flowers are starting to bloom throughout the food forest. All the little ground cover plants ...
05/04/2026

Flower Moon Update

The flowers are starting to bloom throughout the food forest. All the little ground cover plants are breaking through the surface of the soil. It’s all coming alive. You Forage Strawberries in just over a month!

We’ve been working hard weeding and planting our 7,500 strawberry crowns. I’ve finished sprucing up the Flavorfest section and working up the hill. We’ve decided to start planting Honeoye there instead. Flavorfest just didn’t produce well.

Phillip worked through the entire Wendy section and added more plants there. We are meeting in the middle next to plant the 2,500 Darselct variety. This is the section where we planted Charlotte in 2021, we won’t plant any more of it. They were not prolific producers and were also somewhat difficult to source from Canada.

He also spent the weekend working on our fence. It’s an expense and job we’ve been trying to avoid, but we decided it really needed to be done. Hopefully we don’t catch too many deer.

Keep an eye on the calendar if you’d like to come visit the farm. If you plan to attend one of our Tuesday events please RSVP. Things change quickly with the weather and juggling family commitments.

Lastly, Phillip captured Caldwell 11, also known as the Bubble Nebula. He used the 8” Celestron reflecting telescope with a long focal length (i.e. very high magnification) along with our monochrome camera setup. Because of the high magnification, new techniques were necessary to correctly capture this Nebula. Most notably, the camera has a setting called “binning”. Normally when you photograph, you use bin 1x1, meaning 1 pixel of the camera sensor = 1 piece of data on your image. In this instance, I used 2x2 binning which combines 4 pixels into one SUPER pixel. Doing so greatly increases the signal-to-noise ratio, allowing faint objects to be better shown.

I could tell you all the facts but NASA Science has a great description of the nebula. Go check out their website.

Hope your Spring is abundant and you are able to plant lots of plants. Excited that my next update will let you know about foraging fruit!

-Gwendolyn

04/26/2026

What strawberry planting season looks like. The goal is to have touched the whole forest in the next month to make sure these plants thrive.

took a quick single shot last night of the waning gibbous with the camera using the filter.What’s that mean? When...
04/26/2026

took a quick single shot last night of the waning gibbous with the camera using the filter.
What’s that mean? When the camera takes the picture it only allows in the wave length that hydrogen emanates (656 nanometers) plus or minus a few. This helped block out a lot of light that made it harder to see the details of the moon. Like sunglasses!
Isn’t she beautiful.
-Gwendolyn

04/24/2026

This morning we are live streaming our Sun using a large reflecting telescope and Hydrogen Alpha filters to block out most of the light. You can see the dark patches, those are sun spots!

Learn more about sun spots here:
https://science.nasa.gov/sun/sunspots/

It’s wake up time.
04/19/2026

It’s wake up time.

04/18/2026

Hey folks,
Tonight we are live streaming a few things using our monochrome (black & white) camera:
M38 - Starfish Cluster of about 100 stars
IC417 - Spider Nebula
IC405 - Flaming Star Nebula

The telescope will take images through three different gas filters: Hydrogen, Oxegyn, and Sulfur. Tomorrow I will combing the pictures to produce a color image!

Address

913 WEST Road
Waterboro, ME
04087

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