Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a «sativa-dominant» label taken as a description of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it runs heavily to the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, because none of them makes usable on its own without the others.
Latitude
The single figure that decides whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one no pack states. Equatorial plants need the autumn days to continue late enough for the plant to ripen; at northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or watches it to mould in November. A closer south, in the northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and Mediterranean and low-latitude growers are able to finish plants that northern gardens never will.
The practical reading for a seed listing: an «outdoor» sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree further north of it moves the date back towards the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a better season.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular region by the local growers and climate together, rather than by deliberate selection. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and smells range far more than in a tent-bred line, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a modern product. It brings traits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. «Heirloom» in a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to usable but still far from uniform. A shop offering «landrace» that does not give a origin region and a reproduction history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population carries some tendency to do; long-flowering plants express 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 a plant plant has already gone beyond its natural finish frequently throws a few desperate pollen sacs on its own as a final effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa strain weak by nature; it means the room’s discipline matter for longer. A sealed room, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is done rather than two weeks after remove most of the problem. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is saying something more for a long-flowering line than on anything other category.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A terpene found in high amounts in a lot of old sativa lines and responsible for much of the thing growers mean as the «sativa» smell: green, woody, citrus and slightly floral all at once. It is volatile, lost easily by hot drying, and it fades faster during storage than the heavier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning lines.
To a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the lead terpene, the line probably carries substantial old-sativa genetics regardless of what the percentage says. And when the you are after that smell to survive to the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a warm dry turns a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving towered, open buds rather than round 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 room.
In many sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and will happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a fault that was never there, dropping lights and temperatures only slowing an already long plant even more. The breeder seldom warns which kind to expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Haze
In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and Thai landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and something metallic that no other line exactly has.
In its second sense «Haze» is whatever cross which carries some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads «Haze» without lineage could be eighty percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the flowering time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is not «is it a Haze» but «how much, and via which parent».
Sativa-dominant
The marketing category and not a botanical one. The phrase generally means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, and occasionally means nothing more than that the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people connect with the word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is driven more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of «sativa-dominant» hybrids produce a flat sleepy result while a good number of indica-labelled lines do exactly the reverse. To a buyer the label is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is close to worthless without the aroma description.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace types go further. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the number worth reading ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the single most misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally give the optimistic end of a range, because the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to lines from latitudes where daylength hardly varies across the year, and that the plant never evolved a sharp reaction to changing days. Such plants frequently start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical fix, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys a more clearer finish. A listing which uses «equatorial» is telling you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography misses the instruction inside it.
