By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer

It's not too early to pick up a 2010 wall calendar.  The cool ones are the first to go.  If you wait until December to buy yours, which is what I did last year, all that are left are the sappy sentimental ones -- puppies or kittens or teddy bears -- because they print so many of them, I'd guess.  Or else the oddities -- 12 months of Elvis impersonators, say, or some other concept that will wear thin before you turn the page from January to February.

So act now and pick up something you'll like looking at every month.  The Organic Kitchen Garden 2010 Wall Calendar from Amber Lotus Publishing, for instance.  It has beautiful photographs of kitchen gardens and/or produce each month plus growing, harvesting, canning, and cooking tips for said produce.  Plus a recipe.   Ann Lovejoy, author of 20 gardening books and two cookbooks and a regular garden/food columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, supplies the recipes and tips.  And Robin Bachtler Cushman, a horticultural photographer known well to Sunset--her photos have appeared in both our magazine and our books--provided the images.

You can order the catalog directly from the publisher.  And, here, just because they're pretty, two more photos from the calendar.