You use this years new growth to c hip bud with, at least I do. Not sure about dormant wood. You bud up high or down low, where ever you have matching size wood. Meaning when you take off a bud, you want to find matching wood that is around the same size to fit it in. A lot of times, especially with bigger trees, you have to go up higher then you may like to find that wood. Unless you give the tree a serious haircut and force it to branch out lower.

{{gwi:75050}}

You can use dormant wood as long as it's still fresh.. done it many times myself.

Oops double post...

This post was edited by scottfsmith on Sat, May 25, 13 at 9:33

This sounds great thanks guys. It sounds like similar to whip and tongue, you can chip bud (or T-bud?) up high on matching pencil thick wood if you like, preserving the rest of the tree. In most of the diagrams I've seen of T-budding, they bud down low on the main trunk, and whack off the rest of the tree/rootstock above. I think those diagrams are for mainly geared at making trees from rootstock... not making 4n1 and 7n1 etc. cocktail trees which is my goal for testing different varieties in limited space.

So it sounds like you can bud up high and keep rest of the tree in tact.
Can you also bud down low on the trunk and not whack off the top? I guess only apical dominance sending energy to the new variety is the limiting factor here, so budding high would be best if trying to keep the rest of the tree OK. And budding low--without whacking off the top--would be a gamble.