citrusboy: no to A, not even if you work at UCR. You can go to meetings at Lindcove, they send invitation to that too, and then suggest on what you want added to the early release dates from their collections. They will deliberate on those new varieties and get the consensus before adding them. If you can travel to Watsonville sometime next year's citrus tour at Gene Lester's farm, you can ask budwoods from him and he freely gives. There are 200 cultivars to choose from his collection, I think he has several that even the UCR germplasm doesn't have at the moment. Email me sometime this December and will let you know the exact dates. Meanwhile, if you can't wait that long, Gene Lester has another citrus tour this coming fall as part of the various tours during Festival of the fruit at San Luis Obispo, and that is somewhere between Sept 5-9. I don't have exact details, just my memory from discusssions with CRFG. It is worth the trip to visit Gene Lester's Citrus collections.

I don't know if I am ordering this time around. I usually get some orders going, but I ran out of branches to graft to lately after the round of summer budwood orders. Most of my budded citruses from about 1-2 years ago are now loaded with fruits and am excited to taste them the first time. You can't get these fruits for sale anywhere in the entire USA and I will be enjoying them soon. So it will be a shame to graft over these loaded branches. Meanwhile, I have seedlings of flying dragon going, so will have to wait for 2 more years before ordering new budwood. The minimum order now amounts to only $27 for 36 buds minimum, still less than the price of one potted citrus from our local nursery ($30). The $27 should give you at least 12 buds each for the 3 varieties. So for Californians, this is truly one bargain sources of some citruses that you will not find in any of the retail stores, not even the specialty citrus stores that would brag and sell their uncommon cultivars for $150 per plant. For non-Californians, the prices would be three times as much. Texas also has similar budwood program and they share some common citrus germplasm with UCR. I don't have much details about the Texas budwood program, only that it was mentioned to me by one of my credible citrus hobbyist colleagues.

Well, I hought I'd post an update on my budding experience. My success last year and my research led me to think I knew what I was doing. Hubris is a harsh teacher. I don't know if it was time of year, bad technique, or phase of the moon, but it was an abject failure. I ended up with seven successful buds, and those haven't started to grow yet (though they aren't dead.) Still, spring is here, the birds and bees are flitting about, love is in the air, and my rootstock is still alive, so I'm going to try again. Howver, UCR didn't ship my January order, and in talking with them I found out that they may not be selling to buyers without a registration number in the future. So, since I have 100 rootstocks and no immediate source of budwood, I'm looking for anyone who might be interested in selling me some bud sticks. I have a wide range of interests (as can be seen from my first post,) but I'll consider anything. If you have some you'd like to sell me, please contact me directly and we can discuss it.

I would check with the CCPP site to see if we even have this clean budwood available here in California. If so, then you could contact Four Winds and see if they have it or would consider budding it. Also, another option would be Monterey Bay Nursery, who were budding unusual citrus cultivars. Not sure if they are still budding their own trees, as they would be required to do this under screen now, and that is a significant expense for growers. Patty S.