The good news for you is that some of the best agricultural sites in the US consist of red clay soil. As long as your property DRAINS sufficiently, it's no big deal to tame this stuff. Trust me, I know from personal experience! Rather than looking at the big picture, why not focus on one small portion of your landscaping....one area that will make you happy each time you look at it? The ordeal of it ALL won't seem so insurmountable if you attack it a little bit at a time. Eric had the right idea in his earlier comment. I'd surely suggest that you turn as much of your property into something useful (and easier to take care of) instead of grass. Large landscape beds and tree collections can all be mulched to keep weeds down and to add to their attractiveness. Assorted mulches eventually break down and begin improving that soil, too. When we moved to our present home, this yard was pretty discouraging, too. I was horrified at this brick hard stuff we were supposed to grow stuff in. We tilled in a fair amount of aged bark fines and compost ONLY into those areas where we planned to add landscaping (shrubs, perennials, and annuals). The several trees we added, as well as the grass (mostly weeds when we got here), simply had to make do. Guess what? Trees planted directly into that hard red clay, with no amendments at all, grow like crazy! Those beds were amended once. We top dress with mulch and compost annually. We aerated the areas meant for grass heavily, then sodded with a hybrid Bermuda. After a very brief growing in period, the grass began to thrive like crazy on top of that red clay. Again, with very little watering (and we don't have an irrigation system). Come to find out, there's nothing difficult about growing in red clay soil. Well, we use a heavy duty auger to plant things rather than a shovel... but so what? ;-) Our plantings have thrived with less water, less fertilizer, less fuss than I have ever experienced in all of my years of growing! Go figure.

I would guess that your frog is a dwarf, so may get no larger and if it hasn't displayed aggression toward it's tankmates, it should be safe enough, but I would also guess that the rope fish was taking too much of the food, so by climbing atop it, the frog was simply trying steal food, not attack the fish. If you want to get over fear of snakes, many zoos and herp societies have programs that teach about them and also help those with your fears, which is good, because while dangerous snakes must be respected for what they are and either avoided or treated with great care and only by experts, most all are really both harmless and quite beautiful creatures, so you would gain much by learning to appreciate them.

How aggressively you CAN root prune depends on your tree's stored energy level. Heavy root pruning of a weak tree can be damaging or disastrous, while root pruning a healthy tree while it's growing robustly can usually be done with impunity if follow-up care is appropriate. As you know, the best time to work your (tropical ficus) tree hard is early summer. There is a window between Father's Day and Independence Day that in which I do as much repotting of houseplants and tropicals as possible. Root pruning isn't an all or nothing affair. I've been working on the roots of a Taxus (yew) as a bonsai for more than 8 years, trying to reduce a very deep root system to where I can get the tree in a bonsai pot. The top makes a very impressive bonsai already because I've been working on its refinement, but a plastic clothes basket doesn't meld with the tree in harmony as attractive as a discerning eye might demand. The point is, it's often better to consider the viability of the tree and work in stages than to shoot for the moon in one fell swoop. I'd set some time aside to bare root, and I'd keep at it until you accomplished that worthy goal. Future repots will be easier, and leaving the hardened soil only assures a limited tree. Here is something that explains the seeming paradox about why plants need air in the soil. I'm copy/pasting from something I left on another thread, but it should still offer an understanding: Though roots form readily and often seemingly more quickly on many plants propagated in water, the roots produced are quite different from those produced in a soil-like or highly aerated medium (perlite - screened Turface - calcined DE - seed starting mix, e.g.). Physiologically, you will find these roots to be much more brittle than normal roots due to a much higher percentage of aerenchyma (a tissue with a greater percentage of intercellular air spaces than normal parenchyma). Aerenchyma tissue is filled with airy compartments. It usually forms in already rooted plants as a result of highly selective cell death and dissolution in the root cortex in response to hypoxic conditions in the rhizosphere (root zone). There are 2 types of aerenchymous tissue. One type is formed by cell differentiation and subsequent collapse, and the other type is formed by cell separation without collapse ( as in water-rooted plants). In both cases, the long continuous air spaces allow diffusion of oxygen (and probably ethylene) from shoots to roots that would normally be unavailable to plants with roots growing in hypoxic media. In fresh cuttings placed in water, aerenchymous tissue forms due to the same hypoxic conditions w/o cell death & dissolution. Note too, that under hypoxic (airless - low O2 levels) conditions, ethylene is necessary for aerenchyma to form. This parallels the fact that low oxygen concentrations, as found in water rooting, generally stimulate trees (I'm a tree guy) and other plants to produce ethylene. For a long while it was believed that high levels of ethylene stimulate adventitious root formation, but lots of recent research proves the reverse to be true. Under hypoxic conditions, like submergence in water, ethylene actually slows down adventitious root formation and elongation. If you wish to eventually plant your rooted cuttings in soil, it is probably best not to root them in water because of the frequent difficulty in transplanting them to soil. The brittle "water-formed" roots often break during transplant & those that don't break are very poor at water absorption and often die. The effect is equivalent to beginning the cutting process over again with a cutting in which vitality has likely been reduced. If you do a side by side comparison of cuttings rooted in water & cuttings rooted in soil, the cuttings in soil will always (for an extremely high percentage of plants) have a leg up in development on those moved from water to a soil medium for the reasons outlined above. ******************************* You can skip the rooting hormone and fungicide if you want. They're not necessary. I do use a little Superthrive (for its auxin) as a root soak after repotting, though. I've done some experimenting with loose controls in place and while it has proven useless as a 'tonic', it is effective at stimulating root growth and root division. I fill a tub with water and a little Superthrive & fully saturate the soil in the tub immediately after repotting. Securing the plant to the pot so it can't move in relation to the pot fractionalizes the time it takes for the tree to establish in its new digs, too. Al

It is not "normal" for a puppy to be defensive, but he is a little guy and only just started receiving kindness when you got him. I don't have an opinion on whether this pup is really aggressive. There are so many different reasons for a dog to respond with snarling, etc. Resource guarding is very specific behavior and may not be an issue beyond resources. Resource guarding is different from dog aggression and you would need an experienced trainer or behaviorist to determine that and the strategies to deal with it. He should be neutered as soon as medically possibly. That would be at 6 months, I think. One key in dog training is to set up the puppy for success BEFORE you need to correct undesirable behavior. Raising your voice is not a correction for an untrained dog, and verbal corrections don't need to be loud, anyway. So instead of just putting them together and verbally correcting him, supervise their interactions and reward him profusely for appropriate behavior. Just putting them together on one bowl is not really training, and a moment could go south in a second. And he would not apply the experience of "sharing" a bowl of food with "sharing" in general. He might instead learn that he has to compete to get what he wants. He should learn to eat only on command, and that really needs professional guidance with a trainer if you are not familiar with how to train this. Training a puppy is very complicated. It is way easier to train proper behavior than untrain bad behavior, so doing this now is a good investment of time. Do NOT apply Milan-style training ever. Trying to train a dog by copying Milan is like trying to drive a race car after watching NASCAR. Dogs, especially puppies, learn more with positive reinforcement than negative corrections and domination. Good luck, and thank you so much for seeing how important this little guy's life is.