Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other kind 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 person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, since it leans heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them makes usable on its own without the rest.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing category and not a measurable one. It usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the listing, which occasionally means no more than a certain the buds are longer or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s other lines.
The experience people connect with the word, lively rather than sedating, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by THC balance than by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy sleepy result and plenty of the opposite lines deliver the reverse. For a grower the label is worth something as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be stopped after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is a fact to reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica stock almost always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude
The single figure that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Equatorial plants require a run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it rot in November. A further to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers can ripen lines that northern growers cannot.
The practical reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” line harvest date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within southern Europe or the western United States, and every step north of it moves the finish later into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a better season.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured 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. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of the range, since the longer end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the sensible first step if you have a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is seldom caught out.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large amounts in many classic sativa lines and responsible for most of what growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, woody, citrus and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. When a listing names terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain most likely has real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the label claims. And when the grower wants that profile to survive by the jar, the drying has to be cool and slow; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis line has a degree of capacity to do; long-flowering lines express it more often, for a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering to trigger it off, and a old plant has gone past its natural end frequently throws a few desperate male flowers on its own as a last effort to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line weak by nature; it makes the grower’s consistency count for a longer stretch. A sealed tents, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is done rather than two week later take away the greater part of the risk. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is saying something more on a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to grow fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, giving spired, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning lines it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a problem that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying an already slow plant further. The listing seldom warns which kind to expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something metallic that no other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid that contains some of that family, which by now is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent the old family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over generations to a particular region by the local growers and growers together, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells spread far more than a tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a modern product. It carries traits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to an equatorial daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually 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 a hybrid. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give an collection point and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Equatorial
Describes plants from latitudes where daylength hardly varies through the year, which means where the plant never evolved a strong response to shortening days. Such lines frequently flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical fix, handed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the final weeks. It costs some little yield and buys a earlier decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower who reads it as mere geography has missed the instruction inside it.