Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the person trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, because none of them makes sense on its own without the rest.
Latitude
The single number that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Equatorial lines need the run of shortening days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; in northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. A further to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens can ripen plants that temperate gardens never will.
The usable reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” line harvest date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it moves the date back into the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors is looking for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, not a longer season.
Haze
In its first sense a specific line of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches openly, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note metallic that no other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross which contains a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage could be eighty percent the classic family or one small fraction of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some capacity for do; long-flowering lines express it more, and the reason is one simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can set it off, and a old that has waited past its intended finish frequently produces a few desperate male flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it makes the room’s discipline count for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready and not a week after take away most of the problem. A listing which states the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more for a sativa than for any other category.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of the spread, since the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa lines run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a reasonable first pass for a grower on a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to push out new bud growth on top of existing ones, giving spired, irregular buds rather than round ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a stress response, usually caused by light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a problem that was never not a problem, dropping lights and heat only delaying a slow flower further. The breeder seldom warns which type you should expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines from regions in which daylength hardly varies across the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to changing days. Such plants frequently flower slowly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working fix, passed down among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the last weeks. It costs a little yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere geography misses the instruction hidden in it.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in a lot of old sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing people mean as the “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly sweet at once. It is volatile, lost easily through hot drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the strain probably carries real Haze-era genetics regardless of what the label claims. And where the grower are after that smell to survive to the jar, the drying has to be slow and cool; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line to a flower that smells of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth which follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial types triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and will not be halted after it begins, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is the fact to read before deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming from indica strains nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to a particular region by local climate and climate together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas range widely than any tent-bred line, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to an daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection for tent life; it is closer to usable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give a origin region and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue category and not a measurable one. It usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa by whoever drafted the description, and occasionally signals no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people associate with a word, clear-headed rather than sedating, is driven more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat couch result and plenty of indica-labelled stock do the reverse. For a buyer the label is worth something for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene description.