F. C. Hornberger, Home and Garden Service 
7 
cial importance, the following sugges- 
tions are offered as an aid in the search 
for the sports bearing fruit that is differ' 
ent from that of the parent variety in 
one or more clearly recognizable charac' 
teristics:—Furthermore, limb or branch 
sports in otherwise normal trees are 
usually more easily identified than those 
occurring as entire'trees or otherwise, so 
that in the beginning, at any rate, a 
search for striking limb variants is likely 
to be most satisfactory. 
“Many valuable strains and varieties 
that originated as desirable bud sports 
are in commercial culture in both citrus 
and decidous fruits and other vegeta- 
tively propagated food plants. The pro¬ 
duction of many fruit orchards has been 
greatly improved during recent years by 
eliminating through top-working or re¬ 
planting inferior strain trees that result¬ 
ed from the unintentional propagation of 
undesirable bud sports.” 
COMMENTS by F.C.H.:—Read our 
article “Facts or Theory?”; you will note 
that the authors of “Searching for Bud 
Sports In Fruits” have been at this work 
for 25 years, and have collected a vast 
amount of data. I have only printed a 
few brief extracts from the article; in 
particular note the last paragraph above, 
“unintentional propagation of undesir¬ 
able bud sports.” Among Glads, the 
“color bud sport” is often pulled up as a 
“rogue”, that is as some other variety ac¬ 
cidently mixed with the bulbs, but all 
sports are not of color alone, some never 
appear as a color change, but may ap¬ 
pear as inferior plants, growth or pro¬ 
duction. All of these unnoticed traits 
would ordinarily be “put down” as the 
result of soil, season, drought, hot sun, 
and adverse conditions in general. Some¬ 
times these factors do cause these things, 
but at the same time many “changes” do 
not right themselves, and so become a 
fixed characteristic of these plants. Their 
unnoticed propagation with the original 
stock causes a “lowering of quality”; the 
variety is said, not to be as good as it was 
at one time. 
When you practice a system of “selec¬ 
tion” that all seed producers should prac¬ 
tice, you will be building up the quality 
of your stock. Superior strains are built 
in this manner. In color sports where 
the change is most radical, for example 
where a bright red variety will produce 
an entire spike where all the color is 
light pink or white, if you label and test 
this plant, you will find that the next 
season some of these “changes” will be¬ 
come permanent while in other instances 
the same plant that was pink or white in 
color will be back to its true color. As 
a rule all color changes that remain the 
second season have already become 
“fixed" or established in the new charac¬ 
teristics; this then is the variable law in 
all plant life. 
HOW TO PLANT AND GROW 
GOOD GLADS 
If you will read all the information we 
print in this catalog, you will find that 
it will help you to understand these 
instructions much better. The bulbs you 
use to plant, should be stored right, 
fumigated to destroy any thrips, and 
even if no thrips have been found in the 
past, fumigation for that purpose is the 
best kind of precaution that you can use. 
Just before planting your bulbs they 
should be soaked in some kind of a dip, 
to help maintain the bulbs in a healthy 
condition, and destroy any disease organ¬ 
ism, such as scab, etc., that may be on 
the bulb, but not always visable to the 
naked eye. A cheap and easy to use 
disinfectant that many of our largest 
growers use, is to take one ten cent can 
of lye, such as you purchase in the 
grocery store, and mix with 20 gal. of 
water, put your bulbs in cloth or burlap 
sacks, and let them in this mixture from 
10 to 12 hours, then remove bulbs, dry 
them off, and plant them, there are many 
other dips, but as I do not regard them 
as any better, and not as easy to handle, 
I will not mention them here. 
DISTANCE AND DEPTH: As a 
rule more people plant Glads in rows 
like garden vegetables, than are planted 
