I have one clivia seed at the moment, will have more after next bloom. they are Big seeds and take over 6 months to germinate. Also have seedlings a few years old.

I know my zone five is WAY different than your zone five, but I wouldnt just plant them directly in the ground this time of year and expect anything to survive. I would recomend if you have room to start these indoors, under lights, with seed mixture. I Refrigerate for months at a time, not just week. I do not start my seeds untill february or march usually. However I know others who start much earlier. I usually check my seeds 1 or 2x a month for mold, giving them a quick soak in a very diluated mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide. Take a soda gallon and add a couple tlbs spoons of the HP. Keep ths soda gallon or gallons . I reuse them when I do my final soaking. I then take the 20 oz cups and write the cross names on the side of the cup, Add the seeds to the proper cup names and soak several nights in the mixture. Then plant the seeds, ALSO others boil water to sterilize their seed mixtures. Ive always found a good freeze has worked for me, I just take my bales of promix and freeze them, under a tarp, they stay pretty dry, If I do that I do not get the flies. Then its under the lights with heating mats for a while. This is a very basic method, but I usually retain a 85-90 percent germination rate and a 75% or so survival rate. Lastly, If your seeds are not germinating after this, well maybe you need to look at the source as well. But I wouldnt blame anyone that the seeds didnt germinate if you just stuck them in the ground, also you said you watered every day. That might be a little overkill. I dont water my seedlings until the top of the earth starts feeling dry to the touch . Too much is as bad as too little. However, Ive done the same thing the past. It wasnt until I started reading online about how to do things that my methods improved. I know there are others here who have more eloborate methods, this works for me, so this is what I do =) Silverkelt

OK, I'll start with adding transplant conditions as related to LFD of starting the seedlings. I've always followed the premise that peppers don't like cold feet, soil temps above 50ðF to transplant, although I've read planting them doesn't harm them they just remain stagnant. Following this thought process, one season I was not able to transplant until the first week of July as June was cold, raw and wet. I didn't have the lights to keep 200 plants happy indoors so needless to say the early bloomers grew very leggy. The solution was was to plant 'em deeper! While members of the same family, indeterminate tomatoes benefit from this as they'll grow roots on the buried portion, peppers don't but they'll benefit from the support the soil gives them. So what does this have to do with seed start date? Nothing unless Mother Nature throws you a curve ball!

If you grow out plants from saved Sungold F-1 fruits, you will get the F-2 generation, which has high variability as the genes recombine randomly. With SunGold F-2s, people who've grown them have reported a wide range of results with fruit ranging from red to orange to gold or golden yellow, and some fruit that is bi-color. The sizes and shapes have had quite a bit of variability as well, ranging from large round cherries about an inch in diameter to grape shaped tomatoes. The important question, of course, is the flavor. Almost everyone who's grown out F-2 SunGolds and written about them has found the flavor highly variable as well, and not necessarily in a good way. Some people have gotten sweet fruit, some have gotten sour. Most feel the flavor is not nearly as good as SunGold, but a few thought it was good enough---or at least their friends and family liked it even though it wasn't the well-known SunGold flavor. Many tomato afficianadoes, and some well-known private breeders, have tried to dehybridize SunGold to get a stable O-P version of it. None have gotten an exact replica of SunGold, though Reinhard Kraft of Germany probably has come closest with SunGold Select II, seeds of which likely are available commercially from some seed company. Some people find SunGold Select II a reasonable substitute for SunGold (though not exactly the same as the F-1 SunGold) and others don't. Most people who have tried to dehybridize SunGold have taken their attempts out to 4 or 5 generations, represented as F-4 and F-5 and I've seen some reports of F-8, and then finally have dropped the effort, realizing they'd rather grow and eat SunGold F-1 than an inferior O-P descendant. You should know that the variability is not just in the fruit either. Some folks have gotten very short dwarf plants in the F-2 generation, some have gotten plants that have poor disease tolerance. So, since you are growing for market, assuming you want to grow as many fruit to sell as possible, growing out your F-2 SunGold plants is a risk because you could end up with largely dwarf plants that have poor disease resistance and produce red cherry fruit with flavor that might be great (rare in the info I have found online), mediocre or poor. To me, that makes growing out SunGold F-2 very risky and possibly a waste of resources (especially space). Dehybridizing SunGold into a stable open-pollinated variety is sort of the Holy Grail among tomato afficianadoes, and I've never seen one report of someone saying that their F-2 plants have given them an exact replica of SunGold. If you have the time and space to experiment and are willing to dedicate several years of effort to growing out SunGold generations, you are likely to find that the F-2 generation was the most unstable, and you may get less variability as you go forward with each new generation of plants. From that point forward, you save seed each plant generation only from the plants that gave you the closest version of what you're seeking, and which each generation, you may come closer to getting a reasonable facsimile of SunGold. Or, you may not. However, since Reinhard Kraft already has done all that to produce SunGold Select II, you'd just be duplicating his efforts with no guarantee you'd get his same results. It seems easier to me to track down and buy SunGold Select II seeds, and as far as I can remember though I don't know if I saw them in this year's catalog, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has SunGold Select II. Finally, be very careful not to call the tomatoes you are selling from saved seed "SunGold" because they are not, legally speaking, SunGold. You'll have to call them something else to avoid getting into legal trouble with the seed company that holds the legal rights to SunGold. By the way, with Porter the reason you have had good results from saved seed is because it is a long-stable (for decades now) open-pollinated tomato from the old and now-defunct Gene Porter & Sons Seed Company once based in Stephenville, TX, so saved seed (assuming it wasn't cross-pollinated by an insect and that you don't get a sport or mutation) will give you stable Porter tomato plants. That's the difference between open-pollinated varieties and hybrids, and it is a very huge difference. To get the original SunGold F-1, you'd have to cross the original parents used to breed it (a closely held, trade secret, so no one knows what they are), which is how the wholesale producer who has the rights to SunGold produces new seed for it. I've tried some open-pollinated versions of several different hybrid tomato varieties, and for the most part found them inferior (sometimes very inferior) and went back to growing the hybrid version.