Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces 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 read as a description of character, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, since it runs heavily to the classic end of the spectrum where the words matter most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since none of them is sense without the others.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term rather than a measurable one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, which sometimes signals nothing more than that the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s other releases.
The effect people associate with a word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by THC content than it is by ancestry, and a good number of « sativa-dominant » releases deliver a heavy sleepy result while a good number of indica-labelled lines do the opposite. To a grower the percentage is worth something for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to worthless without the aroma description.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a « fourteen-week » sativa grown with a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of a range, since the longer end moves less seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the sensible first pass if you have a room on a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is seldom caught out.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines from latitudes in which daylength hardly varies through the year, which means that the plant does not develop a sharp response to changing days. Such plants frequently start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed down between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the final weeks. It loses some little yield and buys an earlier clearer finish. A listing that says « equatorial » is telling you this with one word, and a grower who reads it as mere geography misses the point hidden in it.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Equatorial lines need a run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant to finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it to mould in November. A further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal and subtropical gardens are able to finish plants that temperate growers never will.
The usable reading for a seed listing: an « outdoor » sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree further north of that pushes the finish later into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is shopping for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, and not a better season.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai landraces, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its looser sense « Haze » is any hybrid which carries a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says « Haze » and gives no lineage may be eighty percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering character follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never « is it a Haze » but « how much, and through which parent ».
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through generations to a particular place by local growers and growers together, and not by modern selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells range widely than a tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a modern product. It brings habits that made sense in an open field, such as a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to an daylength most growers never provide. « Heirloom » on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for some generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent conditions; it is nearer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop offering « landrace » without a collection point and a generation history is using the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in high amounts in many classic sativa lines and accounting for most of what people mean as a « sativa » aroma: green, piney, lemon and slightly sweet at once. It is volatile, driven off easily by hot drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during storage than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the you are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line into something that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth that follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch continues three to five weeks and will not be stopped after it has started, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is a number worth reading before choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population has a degree of capacity for do; long-flowering lines show it more, and the reason is a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can set it going, and an plant plant has already gone beyond its natural finish frequently throws a few late pollen flowers on its own in a final effort to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it makes the room’s consistency count over a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is done and not two weeks after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which states a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth worth hearing on a sativa than on anything else.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to grow new bud growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat symptom, typically from light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month chasing a fault that was never there, dropping lights and heat only slowing a long flower even more. The breeder rarely warns which kind you should expect; the parentage generally does.