Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, because it leans strongly to the long-flowering 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 particular order, because not one of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Latitude
The one number that determines if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial lines require a run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant to ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean and subtropical growers are able to finish plants that temperate growers never will.
The usable reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step north of it pushes the finish later into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa outdoors is looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a better season.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial lines triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be stopped after it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is the number to read before choosing when to switch. 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 centimetres has room. People coming over from indica stock nearly always flip too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of old ones, giving towered, open buds instead of round ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a heat response, usually caused by light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and will happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes a month hunting a problem that was never not there, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying an already long flower even more. The breeder seldom warns which kind you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in high amounts in many old sativa lines and responsible for much of what people mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, piney, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by hot drying, and it degrades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading terpene, the line probably carries substantial old-sativa genetics regardless of what the label claims. And where the you wants that profile to survive to the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack promised.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the one most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of a range, because the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the sensible first pass if you have a room with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular place by the local climate and climate alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells range far more than any tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern product. It carries traits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is closer to usable but still not a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” without a origin point and a generation count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis population has a degree of capacity to it; sativa plants show it more often, for a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering to set it off, and an old plant has already gone past its intended end often produces a few late pollen sacs on its own as a last effort to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line unstable by nature; it makes the grower’s consistency matter over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is done and not two weeks after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing that states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth worth hearing for a sativa than for anything else.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing category and not a measurable one. The phrase usually means that more of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa by the breeder who wrote the description, and occasionally means no more than that the buds are airier or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with a word, lively instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene profile and by THC balance than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat sleepy effect while a good number of indica-labelled lines do the opposite. To a grower the percentage is worth something for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is close to useless without the terpene description.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note sharp that no other line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage could be mostly percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Equatorial
Refers to lines out of latitudes in which daylength hardly varies through the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a sharp response to changing days. These plants often flower reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working response, passed down between sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the last weeks. It loses a yield yield and buys an more decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower who reads it as mere origin has missed the instruction inside it.
