Marcus Chen
Areas of Expertise: Pest Identification | Integrated Pest Management
Find the Bug First
That has been my rule since 2015, and it is what led me to become a certified Integrated Pest Management specialist.
Most of my work involves identifying garden pests accurately and choosing the least disruptive way to manage them.
I teach pest control workshops, write for gardening publications, and help home gardeners identify what’s damaging their plants before choosing a treatment. Every article I share here follows that same approach.
How I Work
Most of my methods are simple. Hand-picking, insecticidal soap, and a few rows of dill and yarrow to bring in ladybugs handle most of what I see.
Over the years, I have dropped what did not hold up, like dish soap sprays and store-bought ladybugs.
Everything I share here has earned its place the same way, and that is the standard I hold every Marcus Chen article to.
Mold is sneaky. It does not show up with a warning sign. It creeps behind walls, under floors, and above ceiling tiles while nobody pays
Nobody wants to think about bed bugs. These little critters are a total nightmare. They sneak in. They hide. And they multiply like crazy. Catching
A minor bed bug problem is disruptive enough. A severe infestation is something else entirely. By the time bed bugs have spread beyond one bed
You notice it while rinsing out a mason jar. A small brown speck, moving. Then another, near the bag of lentils you harvested and dried
Warm weather changes the pace outside your house. Ants move along trim, flies follow food odors, mosquitoes look for water, and wasps start checking protected
Owning a home comes with a quiet kind of pressure. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you know things can break. And when they
Hop Latent Viroid, better known as HLVD or HLVd, continues to be one of the biggest threats facing commercial cannabis cultivation in 2026. The problem
That small pile of what looks like sawdust near a window frame can be easy to ignore. Many homeowners brush it off as dust, dirt,
You finish watering tomatoes, step back to enjoy your raised herb beds, then suddenly start swatting insects around your face and ankles. Experiences like that
Ask most Texas homeowners why they call a pest control company, and you’ll get the same answer every time: bugs. Fire ants, roaches, mosquitoes, termites.
A home-grower mold scenario is any indoor plant-related setup where soil moisture, low airflow, or wet leaves create conditions favorable to mold colonization. Operations like
I work from home and I take it seriously. That means I’ve spent a non-trivial amount of time and money turning our back deck into
