One more flower post

Birds are messy eaters. They spill their seed on the ground. In the spring, when there is rain, the seeds sprout. This year the gophers did a lot of digging beneath the bird feeders and loosened the soil for the seeds to sprout in. There's quite a forest of sunflowers, safflower, and millet. Today one of the sunflowers opened.When these volunteer sunflowers mature the birds just ignore them. I guess it's too much trouble to eat from the flowers when they have the perches on the feeders to eat from.

I have never had much luck with ranunculuses. I tried planting them in potting soil and they rotted. I tried planting them around the yard. The ground I chose was rather hard and didn't get watered enough so they made a few leaves and that was that. I didn't bother with them this year. A couple of ranunculuses grew after the rains. How they survived from their pitiful growth last year I have no idea. Today one opened. It's about an inch and a half across!
It's among a patch of naked ladies I transplanted a few months ago. They got very crowded in their old spot and, even though they say crowding is good for them, they produced only a couple of blooms in the past few years. I separated about a hundred bulbs from my eight square foot plot and planted them all over the yard. (I started out with two bulbs.) I hope at least a few of them thrive. They take a few years to get established so I probably won't get to post any pictures of them in bloom this year. Sorry.

One thing that is clear from the blurry picture of the ranunculus is that I need to get a new digital camera. This one is a nice camera and is very flexible. It's a Kodak EasyShare Z740. Kodak tells me that one of the manual controls I have with this camera is Auto-focus. The manual control I wish it had is manual focus. Its autofocus feature oftentimes chooses the wrong thing to focus on and will not let me take control. So some of my flower pictures are blurs because it finds a leaf to focus on.

Of course a camera that lets me take control of focusing will not be cheap.

---

Update already: So the ranunculus picture isn't blurry. It was just overexposed. I tweaked the picture and reposted it. But the autofocus feature of my camera does make me grumpy when it insists on focusing on the wrong thing and won't let me take over.