Seedlings not getting secondary leaves

I am in a new area with acidic clay soil. I am used to sandy alkaline soil.

I brought some goji berry starts but none of them survived to be planted, so I'm trying to start some from seed.

I've tried several times. Seeds come up and initially look strong. They may hold on for a month or more before dying overnight, but they never get secondary leaves. There's not enough to know whether it's the clay, the acid, nutrient deficiencies or something else.

I have never seen this behavior in anything I have planted from seed.

Any ideas?

Hi Lauren,
I don't have any ideas about why that is happening, but I would suggest getting some potting soil/compost from somewhere else and try the seeds in that. This will rule out other environmental possibilities or even the seeds themselves.

Most of Maine is pretty acidic clay soil. No one that I know starts seeds in the native soil as a general rule (at least not without mixing in compost or potting soil), but I don't think its because it won't work. I have done it before successfully with our soil. I had to add compost and/or plant out sooner because it used up all the available nutrients faster... but they got their real leaves and grew.

***First edit was just typos

***Second edit - is there a chance the soil is contaminated? Seeds can get to a certain point before the roots really kick in. Maybe when the roots kick in, it's picking up something it can't handle?

I'd second Matt's suggestion to start with a clean potting mix to eliminate variables.

As far as the dying overnight, that usually happens to me with damping off, when the environment is too moist and fungus causes the seedlings to pinch at the base of the stem and tip over.  The solution for damping off is air circulation and more free-draining potting media.

The same happened to me last year with goji seedlings, but I started them in a mix of sand and compost in a pot (an experiment which didn't work well for other plants either). They lasted far longer than the sage, but sat there for who-knows-how-long and then died, just as you said. I also scattered them in certain areas with dry soil, thinking that they might come up there on their own, but they didn't. Could it have to do with lack of sunlight, maybe the proper kinds of sunlight?

Maybe Nature can help us. I started potatoes from seed outside in mid-spring, as I had heard they didn't like poor sunlight, but took them inside on cooler nights, and I think I will try this for goji again too.

I don't know if this is relevant to your situation, but I seem to recall Carol Deppe said in one of her books (in the context of albino seedlings, which will definitely die because they can't photosynthesize) that seedlings with a deadly mutation can live longer than she would have expected, which means the nutrition from the mother plant in the seed may last a bit longer than we'd think.