Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the person standing in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of character, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, since it leans strongly towards the classic end of the spectrum 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 none of them makes sense on its own without the others.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over centuries to a particular place by local climate and climate alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas range widely than in any tent-bred line, and that spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength most growers never offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over some generations, often with light selection for tent conditions; it is nearer to usable but nonetheless not uniform. A seller offering “landrace” without a origin region and a generation history is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from regions where daylength barely varies across the year, which means that the plant does not evolved a sharp response to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The working fix, passed down between sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the last weeks. It loses some little yield and buys an earlier decisive finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere geography has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of a range, because the other end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term and not a botanical one. The phrase generally means that more of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by whoever wrote the description, which occasionally signals no more than that the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat sleepy result and a good number of the opposite lines deliver the reverse. To a grower the label is useful for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Haze
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something metallic that no other line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross which contains a share of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents may be mostly percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the flowering time tracks the share, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in high proportion in a lot of classic sativa strains and responsible for much of what growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, woody, citrus and faintly sweet at once. It is fragile, lost quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster in storage than the heavier terpenes that lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the line most likely has substantial old-sativa ancestry whatever the label claims. And when the you are after that profile to survive to the jar, the cure has to be cool and cool; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene sativa into a flower that smells of hay and no trace of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to grow fresh bud growth on top of old ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning lines it is a heat response, typically caused by light too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and some Haze lines, it is built in and will occur in a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a problem that was never not a problem, dropping lights and heat and slowing a slow flower further. The breeder rarely says which type to expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Latitude
The single figure that determines if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Equatorial lines require a autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant to ripen; at high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or else loses it to mould in November. The further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and Mediterranean or low-latitude growers can finish plants that northern gardens cannot.
The usable reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every degree further north of it pushes the finish later towards the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a covered space, and not a better season.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be stopped once it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is a fact to reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis line carries a degree of tendency to do; long-flowering lines show it more often, 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 to set it off, and a plant that has waited past its natural finish frequently produces a few late male flowers on its own in a final effort to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa strain unstable by nature; it makes the room’s consistency count for longer. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is done and not a week later remove most of the risk. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for intersex traits is worth more on a sativa than for anything else.