Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, because it runs heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, because not one of them makes sense on its own without the rest.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis population has some capacity to do; long-flowering plants express it more often, and the reason is one simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can trigger it going, and an old that has already waited beyond its natural end frequently throws a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa strain weak as a matter of nature; it means the grower’s discipline matter over longer. Light-tight tents, stable conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready rather than two week after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on anything else.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that determines if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering plants need a run of shortening days to continue late enough to let the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in the end of October or else watches it rot in November. The further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and coastal and low-latitude growers can ripen lines that temperate growers cannot.
The practical reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it pushes the finish later towards the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer season.
Equatorial
Refers to plants out of regions in which daylength hardly changes across the year, which means where the plant does not develop a strong reaction to shortening days. These lines often start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the final weeks. It costs a yield yield and gains a more decisive finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large amounts in many old sativa strains and responsible for most of what growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost quickly through hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster in storage than the heavier terpenes which dominate most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era genetics regardless of what the percentage says. And where the you wants that smell to still be there to the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial lines go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be stopped after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is the fact to reading before choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally quote the shorter end of a spread, because the other end sells fewer seed.
Sativa plants take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is the sensible first step for a room with a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is seldom caught out.
Haze
In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches openly, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and a note sharp that no line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid that contains some of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says “Haze” without parents could be eighty percent the classic family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The marketing category and not a botanical one. It usually means that more of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by whoever wrote the description, which sometimes means nothing more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s other lines.
The effect people connect with a word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy result while plenty of the opposite lines deliver exactly the opposite. For a buyer the label is useful as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to push out new calyx growth on top of old ones, producing spired, irregular buds rather than round ones. In most tent-bred lines 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, especially Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur under a flawless room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks hunting a fault that was never a problem, lowering lights and heat and slowing an already slow flower even more. The breeder seldom says which type you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular region by local climate and growers alike, rather than by modern selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and smells spread far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries traits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin over some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to usable but nonetheless far from uniform. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give a collection region and a generation history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.