BUD VARIATION IN THE EUREKA LEMON. 87 
tied in a bundle and the number of the 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 frequent 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- 
ance records and on intimate tree knowledge. 
The plan of work in these investigations has been to secure 
individual-tree performance records in carefully selected plats of the 
Eureka variety where the conditions are most favorable for obtaining 
reliable and comparable data. 
