Sativa seeds come 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 grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, since it runs heavily to the classic end of the category and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the rest.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing category rather than a measurable one. It usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the description, which occasionally signals no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with a word, lively rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat couch effect while plenty of the opposite lines deliver the reverse. For a buyer the label is worth something as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is next to worthless without the aroma description.
Latitude
The single number that determines if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Equatorial plants need a autumn days to continue long enough for the plant to finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it rot in November. A closer south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens can finish lines that northern growers cannot.
The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line harvest date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of that pushes the finish later into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, not a longer season.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of a spread, because the longer end sells less seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a sensible first pass if you have a grower with a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene found in large proportion in a lot of old sativa lines and responsible for most of the thing people describe as a “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly sweet at once. It is fragile, lost quickly by fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And where the you wants that profile to survive by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene line into something that tastes of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population has a degree of tendency for do; sativa lines express it more often, and the reason is one plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to set it off, and a plant that has gone past its natural end frequently produces a few late male flowers on its own in a final attempt to make seed.
None of this means a sativa line weak by course; it makes the room’s discipline count for a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, steady conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is ready and not two week later take away most of the risk. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is worth more on a long-flowering line than for any else.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to push out new bud growth on top of old ones, giving towered, open buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a fault that was never not there, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already slow flower further. The breeder seldom warns which kind you should expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Equatorial
Refers to lines from regions in which daylength barely varies across the year, which means where the plant never develop a sharp response to shortening days. These plants frequently flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed down between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It costs some little yield and gains an earlier decisive end. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere origin misses the instruction hidden in it.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is a number to reading ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica strains nearly always flip too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no line quite has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid which carries some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage may be eighty percent original old family or a small fraction 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”.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to a particular region by the local growers and climate together, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas range widely than a tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern hybrid. It carries traits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor life; it is nearer to manageable but still not a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without an collection point and a generation history is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.