Granted it will not be as simple as planting your tomato seeds in late March for May transplanting. You can't grow these plants on a windowsill and they will require a greater investment of your time and attention, but the dividend is new found confidence in yourself as well as new plants. This is Seed Starting 201, the next level. Check out this article for more basic information.
The first thing to do is choose the location for growing your seedlings. Since this is going to take several months, not weeks, and you are going to have to supply artificial light, choose a place that you can spare for the duration. You don't want to have to move things once you have started. A work table large enough to hold the plants you expect to have at plant out time is necessary. Since you can start 72 little plants in the insert most commonly sold for one nursery flat, remember that they will fill 4 flats when the plants have moved on into 4 inch pots.
The next item on the list is the light for your seedlings. In winter, we do not have enough light intensity from the sun to grow seedlings on the windowsill. Even commercial greenhouses use supplemental light in winter here. Don't bother to try, you will only be dissapointed. Use inexpensive shop lights that hold 2 48 inch fluorescent tubes. They are advertised loss leaders at almost any hardware store or building center most weeks. Look in the newspaper ads on Sundays. This week they are $7 dollars per fixture at one store. They usually come without bulbs, but that is good because you want to buy one cool white and one warm white bulb for each. Two of these fixtures with a total of four bulbs will adequately light 4 nursery flats. For more on how to do this (including a link to the why of it) see
