Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it runs strongly towards the classic end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since not one of them is sense without the rest.
Latitude
The one number that decides if a sativa can finish outdoors, and one that no pack states. Long-flowering plants need a autumn days to continue long enough to let the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or else loses it rot in November. The closer south, in a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal or subtropical growers are able to finish plants that temperate growers cannot.
The practical reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every degree further north of it pushes the finish later into the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a longer summer.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular region by the local growers and growers alike, and not by modern selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, not a single plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and smells range widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern product. It brings traits that make sense in an open field, such as a frame no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection for indoor life; it is nearer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give a collection point and a generation history is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes plants out of latitudes where daylength hardly varies through the year, which means that the plant never develop a sharp response to shortening days. These lines often flower reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The working response, passed around among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the last weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains a earlier decisive end. A listing which says “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography has missed the instruction inside it.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something sharp that no other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid which contains a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without lineage may be mostly percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally give the optimistic end of a range, since the other end sells less seed.
Long-flowering plants run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a sensible first step if you have a room on a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx growth on top of old ones, giving spired, irregular buds rather than round ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually from light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes weeks hunting a problem that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying an already long plant even more. The breeder seldom says which type to expect; the parentage usually does.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial lines go further. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is the number to reading before choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in large proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for much of what people mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily through hot drying, and it degrades faster in storage than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing names terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain most likely has substantial Haze-era genetics whatever the label claims. And when the grower are after that profile to survive to the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene sativa into a flower that smells of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The marketing category and not a measurable one. The phrase generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, and occasionally means nothing more than that the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with a word, lively rather than sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and the THC content than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy couch result while plenty of the opposite stock do the reverse. To a grower the percentage is worth something as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some capacity to do; long-flowering plants express it more, and the reason is one simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can set it off, and a plant that has already waited past its intended finish frequently throws a few late male flowers on its own in a last attempt to set seed.
None of these means a sativa strain weak as a matter of nature; it means the grower’s discipline matter for longer. A sealed room, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not a week after take away the greater part of the risk. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for any else.