I recently graft two apples trees but seem to have grafted one scion for a Liberty apple that contained flower buds instead of leaf buds! Yikes, what can be done? These are actually double-grafted using an interstem rootstock on M111 in my continuing effort to make a tree that can handle my wet clay soil, but small enough to be in my back yard.
So I would really like to salvage this one tree. Any suggestions? How can I tell a scion with flower buds to avoid next time.
I don't see any problems with this as there are always a way with apple to have new growth around flower buds every where. When you have to worry about this is for some other kinds of fruits where (depending on position in the tree) there can be plenty of "blind" wood. Or in other words 100% flower buds or no buds at all.
Here are some interesting pictorials and charts to look at that define blind wood and it also includes which rootstocks in sweet cherry that can vary the kind of wood of any cultivar;
Sweet Cherry Rootstocks, MSU
Last year I had grafted an ornamental double flowering cherry to a huge Lapins cherry in an effort to restore some lower spreading branches. It worked well even though it looked really funny to have nothing but pink flowers from all over the new scions last year. This year I forget what it looked like but it's racing along very nice right now.
I had several Liberty grafts do this last year on M27 - nothing weird about the scions. They came out fine though, no apple crop developed. They look good this year!
Sounds like we share the wet soil blessings. I'm testing M27 interstem with M111, Dolgo crab, and P18 rootstocks. I just started them last year, so no idea yet which does better...
Victor,
Is Liberty a ‘tip-bearer’ ... and how many buds did you leave on the scion, and have they all bloomed? Usually at the base of a vegetative bud there are two latent buds that will activate if the primary bud is damaged. …I’ll assume on an apple, the same is true with a blossom or fruit bud..?
I’ve had scions simply bloom, and believe they were tip bearers. But, I’d placed them as bark grafts under the canopy of a well established apple tree where they got so little light … they lived, but did nothing more than remain ‘fruit spurs,’ with no vegetative growth. If you’ve more than one bud, ‘they’ should take off.
Fruit buds or spurs are easy to spot, they’re fat, and on older wood. They’re a real problem at the Propagation Fair … as ‘that’ will often be the only wood someone could find, thus will bring in little more than fruit spurs to place on their rootstock. The only thing worse is when they’d been cut the day before, and are already swelling... But there are generally vegetative, or growth buds near them, so I hunt for at least one of those. At times I’ll ‘warn’ a client not to be scared if ‘it blooms,’ because another bud will likely assume the growth.
…but I’m a bit rusty on my tip-bearers… Maybe a lot more scions are blooming than I’m aware of 
Hi Eric,
I got the interstem idea from you. Doing a double graft of M7 on M111 rootstocks all at once seemed risky, but since you reported success, I gave it a try and it has worked just fine. I am still wondering if this is really going to achieve the desired results: a slight dwarfing of the M11. Let me know if you been able to confirm this.
The liberty scion I grafted looked like a perfect scion (no spurs), but produced 4 flower buds. I carefully pruned off the flowers and some small leaves have formed around the flowers. A vegetative bud has just emerged. So it looks like it is going to be just fine. I was worried that having the graft put all its energy into flowers was going to kill it. The Goldrush Apple that I put on the same set of rootstocks (M7/M111) did not have any flowers and is doing great.
Post Mortem: The flowering Liberty apple scion now appears to have failed. This scion looked like it was going to take for a while. All four buds flowered, but a 5th bud emerged that was vegetative. I carefully picked off all flowers. But it started to fail about two-three weeks ago. This scion had no obvious fruiting spurs, so no obvious way I could tell it would flower.
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