This cage is protecting a young tree from winter deer damage.

It’s fall in the landscape, and for anyone with a plant or two in the yard, that means it’s time to go on high deer alert.

Hungry deer (and there are lots of them roaming neighborhoods these days) increasingly turn to landscape plants when cold weather shrinks their fresh, wild food supply.

The upshot is that deer may browse landscape plants they’ve let alone up to now – or return to feast just when you thought they were gone.

For those who haven’t already imprisoned the landscape behind a permanent eight-foot-tall perimeter deer fence, the next best move is erecting seasonal “spot-fencing” around vulnerable plantings. That includes most new plants in addition to deer favorites and anything you really don’t want to risk losing.

Brad Roeller, who spent 40 years researching deer browsing at the New York Botanical Garden and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., protects his home-landscape plants behind 6½-foot-tall deer netting fastened to 6-foot-tall stakes.

Roeller told podcaster Margaret Roach on her “A Way to Garden” podcast that he erects these barriers by inserting stakes each fall into galvanized posts that he’s hammered around vulnerable plants. Then he pulls up, rolls up, and stores the barriers each spring when the deer threat cools off.

He added that it’s important to keep spot-fencing 18 to 24 inches out from the farthest branches. Closer enclosures invite deer to lean in and even push down too-weak staking, Roeller says, while making enclosures too big invites them to jump in.

For protecting larger areas, Roeller told Roach that a “double fence” of even four feet tall – with the two fences placed four to five apart – work as well as single eight-foot-tall fences.

If fencing isn’t doable, Roeller says the next best thing is using repellents – preferably rotating among scent- and taste-based ones so deer don’t become accustomed to any one.

Although Milorganite is primarily a bagged fertilizer sold in garden centers, it’s made from treated sewage sludge and has deer-repellent properties. Roeller applies it to his bulb and flower beds in spring – half-strength in two applications a month apart.

He then switches to assorted spray-on deer repellents every three to four weeks throughout the growing season, adding that regular spraying is important because the ingredients wear off and new growth has to be covered with new spray.

In an article Roeller wrote for Fine Gardening magazine, he offered this recipe for a homemade deer-repellent spray: 1 egg, ½ cup of whole milk, 1 tablespoon of cooking oil, 1 tablespoon of liquid soap, and 1 gallon of water.

Especially important is spraying repellents on new plants, which are extra enticing to curious deer.

“If their first contact with a new plant is a bad one, there’s evidence to show they will avoid it,” Roeller told Roach.

The last leg in guarding against deer damage is sticking with plants that deer are least likely to eat in the first place.

One of the most detailed lists comes from Rutgers University.

Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve in New Hope also has a list of native plants that are among the most deer-resistant:

These are different looks of spotted lanternfly egg masses that you may encounter in the landscape.

Cold weather is putting an end at last to this year’s crop of adult spotted lanternflies, which massed to Biblical proportions in some spots this fall.

That doesn’t mean we can let down our guard.

One important job now and over the next five months is scouting for lanternfly egg masses – the key to next year’s population.

Before lanternfly adults die off in frosty weather, they mate and lay eggs that overwinter, ultimately hatching into spotted, crawling, little bugs next spring.

By destroying as many of these egg masses as you can, you’re also helping with a second very important job, which is keeping this annoying bug from spreading into other areas.

Lanternflies are already documented in 45 Pennsylvania counties, which are under state quarantine in an effort to keep a lid on their spread. All of the counties in south-central Pennsylvania are on the quarantine list.

We can help keep residents elsewhere from experiencing the bane of a lanternfly mass by taking steps to avoid moving egg masses into new areas.

That’s not easy because lanternflies might lay eggs just about anywhere – not just on favorite trees.

The state Department of Agriculture has an excellent Spotted Lanternfly Checklist that shows what the egg masses and different life stages of the lanternfly look like. It also gives advice on how we can slow their movement and includes a list of places to check for egg masses.

Oddly enough, lanternflies seem to like laying eggs under the wheel wells of cars, which is a common way they move to hatch in a new area.

The Ag Department also advises checking bumpers, under the chassis, and around windshield wipers as other places lanternflies might lay eggs on your car.

Another way lanternflies can spread – especially this time of year – is when residents move firewood with eggs on them. Either check all wood for eggs very carefully, or better yet, don’t take firewood from one of our quarantined counties into an area that doesn’t yet have lanternflies.

As for around the landscape, an obvious first place to look for egg masses is on the trunks of lanternfly-favorite trees, including tree of heaven, maples, black walnuts, birch, zelkovas, and willows. Lanternflies love grapevines more than anything, so check those if you have any.

However, lanternflies also often lay eggs on other hard surfaces, including outdoor furniture, fence posts, lighting fixtures, fences, tarps, tents, sandboxes, trash cans, rocks, and grills.

Fresh egg masses look like smears of grayish mud. Destroy masses by scraping them off and covering them in alcohol, crushing them, or burning them.

Penn State Extension has a detailed Spotted Lanternfly Management Guide that tells you everything you’d want to know about dealing with this relatively new pest. It’s available as a free download on Extension’s lanternfly website.

This is what a winterberry holly should look like in fall when all goes well.

The winterberry holly is one of fall’s showiest landscape shrubs – or at least it’s supposed to be.

This native holly gets pea-sized red or golden berries in fall along with leaves that turn a burnt-gold before dropping. (The leaf-dropping habit, along with leaves that are smooth-edged rather than spiny-edged, make winterberries distinctive from the more familiar evergreen hollies.)

A common disappointment, though, is when the plants grow well enough but never develop the showy fruits.

The explanation usually traces to the fact that winterberries come in both male and female versions. Only the females develop fruits, so if you have only males, you’ll get no fruits.

But also a possibility is that you have a female plant, but there is no male in the vicinity to pollinate it. Without male pollen, the springtime female flowers will wither and fail to set fruits.

In this scenario, it’s possible you’ll see a few berries here and there from the little bit of pollen that bees have carried in from a male afar.

The trickiest cause of poor or no fruiting comes when gardeners are certain they’ve planted both females and at least one nearby male.

What can happen then is that the males and females aren’t blooming at the same time.

Different winterberry varieties bloom at different times, so not only do you have to mix your genders, you have to pick partners so their bloom times overlap.

It’s easiest to do that if you buy in spring and can verify that your intended male is blooming at the same time as your intended female.

Growers and garden centers also usually indicate on plant tags (sometimes on lists) which males are the recommended pollinators for which females.

The popular females ‘Berry Nice,’ ‘Red Sprite’ and ‘Maryland Beauty,’ for example, are pollinated nicely by the male ‘Jim Dandy.’

However, ‘Southern Gentleman’ and ‘Apollo’ do a better job of pollinating ‘Sparkleberry’ and ‘Winter Red.’

‘Scarlet O’Hara’ mates best with – who else – ‘Rhett Butler’ (she’s also happy with ‘Jim Dandy’), while ‘Raritan Chief’ is the preferred male for ‘Harvest Red.’

Another potential problem is a lack of pollinating insects to move the pollen around. Spraying insecticides is a leading reason for that problem.

And if everything is OK on the pollination front, an occasional problem is some sort of seasonal stress that aborts the whole process.

Excess rain and cloudiness at pollinating time, for example, can lead to a poor fruiting year. Disease or intense heat and drought also can cause young, pollinated fruits to drop before they mature and turn color.

This one is typically the cause when you’ve had nice fruits in the past but suddenly don’t get many – or any.

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