Your tomatoes and bikes sure are doing good this year.

Thanks to the dumpster gods and the anti-biking forces! A few weeks ago Lisa and I extracted from the bin behind my workplace five seemingly trashed bikes. We did what any resourceful American would do: we brought them home and put them in a heap in our back yard.

We decided after a chain-lubing and tire-pumping that one bike was in good enough shape that it will be our new house visitor bike! (Yes, I know we need a helmet to go with that Visitor Bike.)

Sunday the last, I incorporated the four remaining trashed bikes into my home landscape. I am pleased with the effect. Tonight methinks I am going to paint them white. For now, here they are in all their faded glory.

As for the neighborhood reaction it is mixed. Lisa loves it. My father-in-law just sighed and Lisa says he prolly thinks we are lowering the property values. My neighbor Herb asked me when I was taking pictures earlier today if the bikes were for sale. No. Are you afraid someone is going to steal them? No. I told him it was an installation for art's sake. I said southerners garden like that. he said "No we do not!" I promised that I had seen some real southern gothic yard weirdness when lived in Alabama. Maybe there, he admitted... He said his neighbor - Lulu Roman star of TV's HeeHaw - does things like that: putting bikes in the yard, but she was raised trashy he guesses. Ouch.

Am I trashy? If I am do I care? I love taking formerly useful things and giving them new life in a new context. Bikes in the yard. Hubcaps on the fence. And so on.

All I know is it sounds like a yard art viewing trip to LulLu Roman's Nashville neighborhood may be in order, but first there are bikes to paint.