Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow usually 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 statement of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, since it runs strongly to the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, because not one of them is usable without the rest.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term rather than a botanical one. It generally means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa according to whoever wrote the listing, and sometimes means no more than that the buds are longer or the smell brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with a word, lively instead of heavy, is governed more by terpene profile and by THC balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» hybrids produce a heavy couch result while a good number of indica-labelled stock do exactly the opposite. For a grower the percentage is worth something as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in high amounts in a lot of old sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing growers describe as the «sativa» aroma: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly sweet at once. It is volatile, driven off quickly by hot drying, and it degrades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the lead terpene, the line most likely has real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And where the grower are after that smell to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to something that smells of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth which follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be stopped after it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the fact to read ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving from indica strains almost always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops 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 additionally quote the shorter end of a spread, since the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the reasonable first step for a room with a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and something metallic that no line quite has.
In its looser sense «Haze» is any hybrid which carries a share of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says «Haze» without parents could be mostly percent the classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the flowering time tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Landrace
A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular place by local growers and growers together, and not by modern selection. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and smells spread far more than any tent-bred line, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers never provide. «Heirloom» on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, often with light selection for indoor life; it is closer to manageable but still far from uniform. A seller listing «landrace» that does not give an collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes plants from regions in which daylength barely changes across the year, and that the plant never develop a strong reaction to changing days. These plants frequently start flowering slowly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed down among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs some yield yield and gains a more decisive finish. A listing that uses «equatorial» is telling you about this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on origin has missed the point inside it.
Latitude
The single number that decides if a sativa will finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require the autumn days to continue late enough to let the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. The closer south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and coastal and low-latitude gardens are able to ripen plants that temperate growers cannot.
The usable rule for a seed listing: an «outdoor» line harvest date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and each step north of it moves the finish back into the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a longer summer.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to grow fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, typically from light too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen under a flawless room. A new sativa grower often wastes a month chasing a fault that is not a problem, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already slow plant further. The listing seldom warns which kind to expect; the lineage usually does.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Almost every cannabis line carries some capacity to do; long-flowering plants express it more often, and the reason is a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering to set it off, and a old that has gone past its natural end often produces a few desperate male sacs on its own in a final attempt to make seed.
Not one of these means a sativa strain unstable by nature; it means the grower’s discipline count for longer. A sealed room, stable conditions and harvesting when the plant is ready rather than two week after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing which states a breeder tests parents for intersex traits is worth more for a long-flowering line than on anything other category.