Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of character, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it leans strongly towards the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, because none of them is sense without the others.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth which comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and will not be halted after it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is a number worth reading before choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains almost always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in large proportion in a lot of classic sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, lemon and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily through hot drying, and it degrades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.
To a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line probably carries real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And when the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying has to be cool and slow; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene line to a flower that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of old ones, producing spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a heat symptom, usually caused by light that is 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 hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a fault that was never not there, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already slow plant further. The listing rarely says which type you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note sharp that no line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid which contains some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” without lineage could be eighty percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering character follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A catalogue term rather than a measurable one. The phrase generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by the breeder who drafted the description, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid content than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat couch result and a good number of the opposite lines do exactly the reverse. To a buyer the percentage is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through generations to one place by the local climate and climate alike, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas spread far more than in any tent-bred line, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an equatorial field, including height that no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “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 a degree of selection towards indoor life; it is closer to manageable but still not uniform. A shop listing “landrace” without a origin point and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Latitude
The one figure that decides if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants require a autumn days to continue long enough for the plant to finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. The further south, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and Mediterranean or low-latitude growers can finish lines that northern growers never will.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere in southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of that pushes the finish later towards the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to plants from regions where daylength hardly varies across the year, which means where the plant never develop a strong response to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering slowly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, handed down between sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the final weeks. It loses a little yield and buys an earlier clearer finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you this with one word, and a grower that reads it as mere origin has missed the point inside it.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misread number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted 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. Seed companies additionally quote the optimistic end of the spread, since the longer end sells fewer seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower with a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line has a degree of tendency to it; long-flowering lines show it more, for one simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to set it going, and a old that has already waited past its natural end often throws a few desperate male flowers on its own as a last effort to make seed.
None of this makes a sativa strain unstable as a matter of course; it makes the grower’s discipline matter over longer. Light-tight tents, steady conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready rather than a weeks later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is saying something more on a sativa than on any else.