Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and a third 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 one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, since it leans heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, because none of them makes sense on its own without the rest.
Haze
In its first sense a particular line of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever cross which contains some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage could be eighty percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with a eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of the range, because the other end moves less seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to more than 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 reasonable first step for a grower on a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population has a degree of tendency for do; long-flowering plants show it more often, and the reason is a plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it going, and an plant that has gone past its natural end often produces a few late male sacs on its own in a final effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa strain weak by course; it means the room’s consistency matter over longer. A sealed room, stable conditions and cutting when the plant is done and not two weeks later remove most of the risk. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for intersex traits is worth worth hearing for a sativa than on any other category.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial types go further. The stretch continues two to five weeks and will not be stopped once it begins, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the number worth read before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers coming over from indica strains almost always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by the local climate and growers together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas spread widely than a tent-bred line, and this spread is the point of growing one.
The trap is treating a landrace like a modern product. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for a number of generations, typically with light selection for tent life; it is closer to manageable but still not a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give a collection region and a reproduction history is using the word loosely, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Latitude
The one figure that decides whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one that no pack states. Equatorial plants require the autumn days to go on late enough for the plant to finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. The further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or low-latitude growers can finish plants that temperate growers cannot.
The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and every degree further north of that pushes the date back towards the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden is looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A catalogue term rather than a measurable one. It generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, which sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s other releases.
The experience people associate with the word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is governed more by terpene chemistry and the THC content than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat couch result and plenty of the opposite stock do the reverse. For a grower the percentage is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, woody, citrus and faintly sweet at once. It is volatile, driven off quickly through hot drying, and it degrades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading terpene, the strain most likely has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the label claims. And when the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack described.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of existing ones, giving spired, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress response, usually caused by light too close or a room too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and will occur under a flawless room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a fault that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only slowing a long flower further. The breeder seldom says which type you should expect; the lineage usually does.