Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the listing. The 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 read as a description of character, 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 leans strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, because not one of them is sense without the others.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population carries a degree of tendency to it; sativa plants express it more often, for a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and a old that has waited beyond its intended finish frequently throws a few desperate male sacs on its own in a last attempt to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it makes the grower’s consistency matter over a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is ready and not two week after remove most of the problem. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high amounts in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for most of the thing people describe as a “sativa” smell: green, woody, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off quickly through hot drying, and it fades more quickly during the cure than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name earns two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the lead terpene, the strain most likely carries substantial old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the label says. And when the you are after that profile to still be there to the jar, the drying is going to be cool and cool; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Equatorial
Describes lines out of latitudes where daylength barely changes through the year, which means that the plant never evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. Such lines often start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed down between sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the final weeks. It costs a little yield and gains an more decisive finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the instruction inside it.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering lines require the run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant to ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or watches it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens are able to ripen lines that northern gardens cannot.
The usable reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step north of it pushes the date back into the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa outdoors is looking for an autoflower or a covered space, not a better season.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, and the one most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally give the shorter end of the spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa lines take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is the sensible first pass if you have a room with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to one region by the local growers and growers together, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread widely than any tent-bred line, and that spread is the whole value of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for a number of generations, often with light selection towards tent conditions; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give an origin point and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Haze
Originally a particular line of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and a note metallic that no line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid that contains a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” without parents may be mostly percent original classic family or a small fraction of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial lines go further. The stretch continues two to four weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is the number to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A marketing term and not a botanical one. The phrase generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, which sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the buds are longer or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with the word, lively rather than heavy, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by THC content than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat couch effect and a good number of the opposite lines do exactly the opposite. To a grower the label is worth something for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels 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 clusters on top of existing ones, giving towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress response, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and some Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a fault that is there, dropping lights and heat and slowing an already long plant even more. The breeder rarely warns which type you should expect; the lineage usually does.