Nothing TO do other than turning things over to the Dept of Patience. One important reminder is to be extremely careful not to over-water. Use a wood dowel as a 'tell'. The wooden stick (bottom row of tools and toward the right) is something I use as a root pic, but it's almost exactly what you would use as a 'tell', only difference being your tell would be 24" long and sharpened at both ends. Use a 48" x 1/4 or5/16" birch dowel rod from a hardware or home improvement store. Cut it in half and sharpen all 4 ends in a pencil sharpener. Push the dowel deep into the pot (as in all the way to the bottom), then remove it. If it comes out moist or stained dark by the soil, withhold water. You can also use a bamboo skewer in a pinch, but the dowel is better. If the plant is going to live, you should see signs of back-budding inside of 2-3 weeks, but it might take longer. I've worked with temperate plants I thought were dead go a full summer with no signs of life, only to wake up the next spring and grow like nothing was wrong. Some of the tools I use for repotting ^^^. Al

Sounds like you might have a Schefflera braid, which have become popular in the trade. Do post a picture so that we can see it, and identify it for certainty. A sharp pair of scissors can be used to remove any growth below the canopy. You should keep up with that kind of pruning or your braided tree will soon lose it's interesting form. It's not unusual for potting soils to harbor mushroom forming fungi. The good thing is that they are feeding on the peat moss (and bark, etc.) in the potting mix and not your plant. I'd not worry about it too much. Keep the mushrooms removed so that spores aren't spread around.

It may not spread plants in your yard but it could be spreding plants miles and miles away. Plants like this produce numerous seeds. The seeds then are eaten by birds. When the birds poop out the seeds, often in the trees in natural areas the seed comes out and can germinate. Another way they spread is by wind. Small seeds can blow a considerable distance in the wind and make their way to a surface water feature. And that brings me to water. Seeds can travel down your extensive canal networks, rivers or other waterways and wash up on shore literally miles away from where its journey began. It's the 3 W's. Wind, Water and Wildlife. So then class, with every invasive species that is planted, Queen Palm for example (which is a popular tree and a catagory II) there is the potential for any of these 3 W's to take place... berries to be produced, then fall to the ground, get eaten by wildlife or blow in the wind or water then take over a natural area and choke out what was supposed to be there to begin with. And it's a shame because Florida has such a wide assortment of unique habitats and it's being thrown away because of misbehaving exotics and a greedy nursery trade. And since you mentioned ficus, you were probably talking about Ficus benjamina which is commonly used as a hedge plant there but there is Ficus microcarpa, a popular indoor houseplant for the rest of the country yet it is a major pest down there. I urge you to please carefully research plants that you want to grow in your garden before doing so. It is part of being a responsible gardener and good steward of the land. Florida has many wonderful native plants too that offer a lot in terms of fast growth, low maintenance, ornamental appeal, wind resistance and drought tolerance. There are so many better alternatives than this plant, I assure you.

We're selling smallish to buy smaller (and cheaper) in a less-nice town. DH just changed jobs because the stress was affecting his health, but the financial impact is pretty massive, so we're going to try to get the house on the market in a couple of months (the delay is for the "Designed to Sell" routine, as it would show quite poorly at this point). We've been told it may actually not be easy to sell our house because it is "so small" for a family house (4BR/2.5BA if we fix up the powder room) at 1900sf especially where prices are so high in my area. People think "if I'm going to pay this ridiculous amount (say $350k) for a house I want this and this and this and this" even though that amount of money doesn't get you a whole heck of a lot in this town! It's a mental block. The average 4BR/2.5BA here has half again more square footage than this house. It's a very good thing that I don't need/want more space because there's very little even as big as we have now in our price range. Everything I'm looking at is about a third smaller; call me a space hog, but I doubt I can hack any less than half the space we have now even though there would be some lovely houses for the taking. When DH and I had a 900sf condo we were constantly in each other's hair, we had use of 1200sf of the house we rented and that was just right. We both need our privacy and when we do fight we both need someplace to go to get away from each other without leaving the house, we both have major emotional baggage about leaving the house during a fight. We also live on different schedules, I am a "night owl" and he is a "lark", and in too-tight quarters we wake each other up. I am hoping for fewer, larger rooms than we have now so that our furniture actually fits into them properly; the rental house had big open spaces so the scale of the furniture had to be bigger, and we couldn't afford to just ditch it because it was too snug in this one. I'm actually looking forward to having the EXCUSE to ruthlessly prune our possessions, get rid of some of the CRAP we have accumulated. We're not even acquisitive people! But the Law of Storage is that "stuff expands to fill all the available space to store it"... LOL It'll be mortgaged, of course, I don't know ANYONE who could buy a house without a mortgage. (Considering a freakin' trailer can bring a quarter of a million dollars in my town...) But I need to be able to make the mortgage payment without hyperventilating.