Hybrid Books

The design for my garden is my own, but the basis comes from two gardening books, both fairly good, both differently philosophied. The first, Square Foot Gardening is your basic traditional more-from-less, intensive gardening book, easy to read, and with clear and plentiful graphics. A ten-year-old could not only follow along, but could do the things described in this book.
Then there is the second book, a bit less traditional, but springing from sound technique, a nice short book, nearly bereft of diagrams, but full of sprightly good humor, by a couple of guys who have written together (with success) before. It's by Tom Christopher and Marty Asher. Very cute, The 20-Minute Vegetable Gardener : Gourmet Gardening for the Rest of Us is a funny book, but so loaded with information that one has to go back and reread it to remember how to do what to get where, at least according to these guys.
It would be nice if one could say, "I want a book with a dash of this, and a dollop of that, a spoon of this, well mixed but fluffy" and poof! There's your book, just what you want. But we haven't reached that point yet, so we have to read our own groups of books, and then stir them together in our own minds and create them ourselves. Sometimes the result is something tangible, such as a garden. Other times it might be something fuzzier, maybe a Philosophy Of Life. But this process of mixing, collating, sifting is our own, not the task of some outside agency, and the books we read serve only as the most raw of ingredients...