Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of effect, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, since it leans strongly to the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, because none of them makes usable on its own without the rest.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis line carries some tendency to it; sativa plants express it more, for a plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it going, and an old plant has already gone past its natural end often produces a few desperate male flowers on its own in a last effort to set seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa strain unstable by course; it makes the room’s discipline matter for longer. A sealed tents, stable conditions and cutting when the plant is done rather than two week after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more on a sativa than on any else.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and Thai parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and a note metallic that no line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that carries a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be eighty percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through generations to a particular region by local climate and growers alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread far more than any tent-bred line, and this variation is the point of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a modern product. It brings habits that made sense in an open field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to a daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for a number of generations, often with a degree of selection for tent life; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an origin region and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants require the autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant to ripen; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or else loses it rot in November. The closer to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens are able to ripen plants that northern gardens cannot.
The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step north of that moves the finish later towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better summer.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of regions in which daylength hardly varies across the year, and where the plant does not evolved a strong reaction to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical fix, handed down between sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on geography misses the instruction inside it.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to push out fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, usually from light too close or a room that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks hunting a problem that is there, lowering lights and heat and slowing a slow flower even more. The breeder seldom says which kind you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial types triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the fact to read before choosing when to flip. 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 centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of a range, because the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest 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 a reasonable first pass if you have a room with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A catalogue category and not a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, and occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s other releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and by THC content than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy sleepy effect while a good number of the opposite lines deliver exactly the reverse. To a grower the percentage is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound found in high proportion in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for most of what people mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and faintly sweet all at once. It is fragile, lost easily by fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the word does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain probably carries substantial Haze-era genetics whatever the percentage claims. And when the you wants that profile to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line to something that tastes of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack described.