fremmel

I just planted the rubber this year. I decided to plant sunn hemp for a couple of reasons. 2 or 3 people here reported that they'd had good results with sunn hemp, I found a good source for it near by, and the seed was cheaper than the bean seed I found. Also, my wife was a little worried that the local foragers from the neighboring village would see the beans and come gather them at night and maybe step on some trees.

This is my first time planting trees so I don't really have the experience to tell you if the benefit of the cover crop is worth planting 2 months late. I would guess not but it's just a guess. On my land I wouldn't have been able to do that anyway. The ground is too soft for a tractor after the rainy season gets going. If yours isn't too soft, maybe just planting the rubber and then sowing the cover crop between the rows would be the thing to do.

For what it's worth, I decide to go ahead and plant sunn hemp as a short term cover crop this year. I sowed it right after I had the rubber field plowed to turn under the weeds at the end of October. I didn't replow to cover the seed and had mixed growth with some areas coming in really thick and some kind of sparse. I let it grow until there was good crop of flowers and then plowed it under about 3 weeks ago. The sunn hemp roots had good nodules and and since it grew to about 1 1/2 m high there was a lot of bulk to plow under so hopefully I did some good.  

I found a good outlet for the sunn hemp seed that's not to far from you Sudyod. About 20 km west of Nong Bua Lampu off the road to Loei. The store's number is 081-965-2137 and in October he was selling the seed for 25 b/kg.

lopburi3, on 2010-12-17 09:55:34, said:

I guess I must have lucked out with a good run. I installed 21 of the Sylvania bulbs when we moved in more than 2 years ago and I have yet to have to replace any. Some of the bulbs are turned on 2 or 3 times a day for a few hours per day total. I tried the Phillips and Toshiba and just couldn't live with the color.

Yes, there is some color variation in the Sylvania line. I did my testing long enough ago that I don't remember the particulars now but I do remember that I tried to go with a brighter 25 W Sylvania bulb and they either didn't have it in the cool white or I didn't like how cool white looked at the wattage. It never occurred to me to go with multiple color bulbs but that wouldn't have worked with the way I wanted to do the lights anyway. My rooms range from 17 to 23 sqm and I used 4 recessed fixtures for the overhead lights. So if I'd used different colors I would have had puddles of different shades of light.

In two of the rooms that I don't use the overhead lights very often but I want bright, good color light when I do, I just use tungsten bulbs. I would have used tungsten through the entire house but they tend to burn out too quickly in the recessed fixtures.

I switched to wide beam halogen downlights in a couple of places, like in the showers and, with a dimmer, over the dinner table and they've worked well. Nice and bright with good color. I'm going to replace the CF bulbs in the kitchen with the halogens as well but I'll have to increase the number of fixtures to cover the same area. One thing I learned, the 220v halogens are much yellower than the 12v. I'd put in a couple of the 220v since they're cheaper and easier to wire but when I tested them they looked pretty bad so I switched them out and went entirely with the 12v.

I'm with ThaiPhuket, I despise most of the energy saving bulbs available here. About 2 years ago I went on a quest to find a decently bright and true color compact fluorescent bulb. After testing 8 or 10 different CF bulbs the best I found was the 20w Sylvania Mini-Lynx spiral Coolwhite . It's still not as bright or as true a color as a tungsten bulb but it's passable. They are rated at 1260 lumens vs the 1280 for a Philips 100w Superlux tungsten but those lumens don't seem to be in the range that my eyes pick up because the tungsten bulbs register significantly brighter for me.

I've read that in farang land there are better bulbs available but at the time they didn't seem to be in Thailand. If that's changed I'd love to hear about a better bulb and where to get them.