We are taking advantage of a few sunny days - and the short period between blackberry harvest and grape harvest - to work on our barn boards. We have over 3600 board feet of white pine lumber, which we plan to use for refinishing the outside of the barn with a board and batten look.
The lumber was cut back in January, and since then has been drying out nicely. The boards are definitely ready to be stained - but it took us a while to choose the type of stain and the color.
We finally selected a Sikkens product, called ProLuxe, which is a translucent, water repellent wood finish that is good for siding and log homes. The color we eventually decided on is a simple natural oak, the lightest of the sample shades in the picture above.
We are staining both sides and all the edges of each board - and each board is 16 ft long....so this is a very slow process. It took a full day for one person to stain 4 layers of boards from our pile of 27 layers. We used extra fence posts as supports for the drying boards - they were taking up the entire area in front of the barn.
It was another great year for our blackberries: We started picking on July 11, at least two weeks earlier than in 2014, and we stopped picking on August 10th - when we stopped tallying. There are still stray berries out in the patch for breakfast cereal or pancakes.
Experimenting with different combinations of fruit was a lot of fun this year, since we finally had a nice variety to choose from. Here are two other delicious blends:
