BUD VARIATION IN THE EUREKA LEMON, 87 



tied in a bundle and the number of tl\e parent tree or a key number 

 is attached to it. In this way the propagator, if he so desires, can 

 keep the progeny of each parent tree separate. 



The bud sticks are cut only by men trained in this work, so as to 

 avoid the danger of cutting bud wood from variable branches and to 

 insure against mistakes in choosing the bud wood. The bundles of 

 bud sticks are packed in properly moistened, sterile, sphagnum moss 

 and delivered to the propagators as soon as practicable, in order to 

 avoid possible injuries from storage. In this way trees of the best 

 lemon strains are being propagated, so that the production from 

 orchards planted with these trees can reasonably be expected to be 

 uniformly of the best type and quality, thus insuring the best possible 

 economic results to both the producers and the consumers. 



SUMMARY. 



The important commercial lemon varieties now grown in Cali- 

 fornia are the Eureka, Lisbon, and Villa Franca. The Eureka 

 variety originated from a seedling in the city of Los Angeles about 

 1860. 



Several important strains of each of the varieties have arisen 

 through the unintentional propagation of bud variations. In this 

 bulletin only the variations within the Eureka variety are discussed. 

 Descriptions of variations in the Lisbon lemon will be found in 

 United States Department of Agriculture Bulletin No. 815. 



Bud variations are of frecjuent occurrence in some of the trees of 

 the Eureka variety. They are of great importance to the lemon 

 industry in that some of the strains which have developed from them 

 are inferior in quantity and quality of production. Bud variations 

 are much more common in lemon varieties than has heretofore been 

 thought to be the case. They occur as variations in the habit of 

 tree growth, in the characteristics of foliage and blossoms, and in 

 the color, shape, size, texture, juiciness, and other characteristics of 

 the fruits. 



The object of these investigations has been to determine the 

 behavior of the trees of the different strains and of the individual 

 trees within the strains, to develop practicable methods for elimi- 

 nating undesirable trees in established orchards, to prevent the 

 propagation of inferior strains, and to isolate and propagate the 

 superior ones through bud selection based on individual-tree perform- 

 a,nce records and on intimate tree knowledge. 



The plan of work in these investigations has been to seciu-e 

 individual-tree performance records in carefully selected plats of the 

 Eureka variety where the conditions are most favorable for obtaining 

 reliable and comparable data. 



