Cooking with Kelly: The new frontier

I've been listening to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle this week on my commute. I'm not passing judgement on the book yet as I'm only a couple of CDs into the endeavor, but regardless, I've been semi-converted.

While I live at home and landscaping plans prevent me from gardening (plus I don't know if the suburbanite neighbors would appreciate a veggie garden), I've decided to make a go at container gardening with tomatoes.

My dad tried this whole tomatoes from seedlings thing a couple of years back, so I'm hoping this goes better than that attempt. I've read up on the subject and started a batch of Early Girl seedlings tonight. If you'd like a beautiful photo of what I can only hope to aspire to, check out this one. These tomatoes are indeterminate, meaning they'll just keep on growing and growing. The instructions say you should start them indoors four to five weeks in advance, although I've read as much as eight to 10 weeks in advance, so we'll see how this goes.

My plan is that when they start to sprout (oh dear I hope they will) in a few days, I'll move them and start another batch of seedlings of another variety to try and hedge my bets. Also, it would be nice if all the tomatoes didn't ripen at once so I have a steady stream for a while.

The Early Girl is supposed to harvest in 62 days when temperatures are consistently above 50 degrees and 55 at night, but no more than 90. I'm thinking these will be ready in June, but who knows.

Here's hoping I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with and this summer will be filled with sauces, pizzas, salads and whatever I can think of to do with tomatoes. If this goes well, I'm going to have to do more investigating on this container gardening strategy.