Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the person standing in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, because it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, because not one of them is usable on its own without the rest.
Latitude
The one number that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Equatorial lines require a run of shortening days to go on long enough to let the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in late October or else watches it to mould in November. The closer south, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal or subtropical gardens are able to finish plants that temperate growers cannot.
The practical reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step north of that pushes the date back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or a covered space, and not a better summer.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be stopped after it has started, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the number worth reading ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica strains nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over centuries to a particular region by the local growers and growers alike, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas spread far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a modern hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to an daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for some generations, often with light selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to usable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an origin region and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Equatorial
Describes plants from regions in which daylength barely varies through the year, and that the plant never develop a strong reaction to shortening days. Such plants frequently start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical response, passed down among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower who takes it as mere origin misses the instruction hidden in it.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population carries some capacity for it; long-flowering lines express it more often, for one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it off, and an plant that has already gone beyond its intended end often produces a few late male flowers on its own as a last effort to set seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa line weak by nature; it makes the grower’s discipline matter for a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, stable conditions and harvesting when the plant is ready rather than two week later take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more on a sativa than for any else.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to grow fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In many sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze lines, it is built in and is going to occur under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes weeks hunting a problem that is not there, dropping lights and heat only slowing an already long flower further. The listing seldom says which kind you should expect; the parentage usually does.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misread number on a sativa pack. For 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 eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the shorter end of the spread, since the longer end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines run anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the sensible first step if you have a room on a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term rather than a measurable one. It generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the description, which occasionally signals no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s other lines.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of heavy, is governed more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid balance than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy couch effect and a good number of the opposite stock do the opposite. For a grower the label is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a particular line of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai landraces, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever cross which carries some of that family, which by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” without parents could 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 never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high proportion in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for much of what growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, woody, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, driven off easily through hot drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during the cure than the heavier terpenes which lead indica-leaning stock.
To a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the strain probably has substantial old-sativa genetics whatever the percentage claims. And where the grower are after that profile to survive by the jar, the cure has to be cool and cool; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack described.