Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the grower standing in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, because it runs heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them is sense on its own without the others.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue category rather than a botanical one. It usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, which occasionally means no more than that the buds are longer or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with a word, lively instead of heavy, is governed far more by terpene profile and by THC content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy effect and plenty of the opposite lines do the opposite. For a buyer the percentage is worth something as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is close to useless without the aroma description.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that decides whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial lines require a autumn days to continue long enough to let the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. The closer south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens are able to ripen lines that northern gardens cannot.
The usable reading of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of that pushes the date back towards the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a better season.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and something metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever cross that carries a share of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without parents could be eighty percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to one place by local growers and growers together, and not by modern selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a finished product. It brings habits that made sense in an open field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to an daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for some generations, typically with light selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless not uniform. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give a collection region and a reproduction history is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line has a degree of tendency to do; sativa lines show it more often, for a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to set it going, and an old that has already waited beyond its natural end frequently produces a few late pollen flowers on its own as a last effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line weak as a matter of nature; it means the grower’s consistency matter for a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is done rather than a weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that states the breeder tests parents for intersex traits is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on anything other category.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to plants out of latitudes where daylength hardly varies across the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a sharp response to changing days. These plants often start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs a little yield and gains a more decisive end. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the point hidden in it.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high amounts in many old sativa lines and responsible for much of what people describe as the “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, lemon and faintly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost quickly by hot drying, and it fades faster during storage than the heavier terpenes that lead most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead terpene, the line most likely carries substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the label claims. And when the grower are after that smell to survive by the jar, the drying has to be cool and cool; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene line to something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth that follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace types triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the number worth reading before deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock almost always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also give the shorter end of a spread, because the longer end sells fewer seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to grow new calyx growth on top of old ones, giving towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a heat symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is genetic and will occur in a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a problem that is not a problem, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already slow flower even more. The listing seldom warns which kind you should expect; the parentage usually does.
