Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it runs heavily to the classic end of the spectrum where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since none of them is sense without the others.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to one place by local growers and climate alike, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells spread widely than a tent-bred line, and this spread is the point of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, such as a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere over some generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is nearer to usable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without a collection point and a generation count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to grow fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, giving towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a problem that was never there, dropping lights and heat and slowing a long plant even more. The breeder seldom says which kind to expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population has a degree of tendency for do; long-flowering plants show it more, and the reason is a plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it going, and an plant that has waited past its natural end often throws a few late male sacs on its own as a last effort to set seed.
None of this means a sativa strain weak as a matter of nature; it means the grower’s consistency matter over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable conditions and harvesting when the plant is done rather than two weeks later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex traits is worth worth hearing for a sativa than for any else.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be halted after it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is the number worth read before choosing when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing term rather than a measurable one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, which sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the buds are airier or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people connect with a word, lively instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene profile and by cannabinoid content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy couch effect while a good number of indica-labelled stock do the reverse. To a grower the label is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to useless without the aroma description.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, which is the single most misread number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of a spread, since the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa plants run anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the sensible first pass if you have a room with a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Equatorial lines need a run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant to ripen; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in late October or loses it rot in November. The further south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal and subtropical gardens can ripen lines that northern growers never will.
The usable rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere in southern Europe or the western United States, and each degree north of that moves the date back into the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular line of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross which contains a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without parents could be mostly percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in high proportion in a lot of old sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing growers describe as the “sativa” aroma: green, woody, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, driven off quickly by fast drying, and it fades faster during storage than the heavier terpenes that lead indica-leaning lines.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the line probably has real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the label claims. And when the grower are after that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that smells of hay and no trace of what the pack promised.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of latitudes in which daylength hardly changes through the year, which means that the plant does not evolved a strong reaction to shortening days. Such lines often start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the last weeks. It loses some little yield and gains a more clearer end. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.