Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken 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, since it runs strongly 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 is usable without the rest.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few equatorial lines triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the number worth read before deciding 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 flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue category and not a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, and occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people connect with a word, clear-headed rather than sedating, is governed more by terpene profile and by THC balance than it is by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat sleepy effect while plenty of indica-labelled lines do exactly the reverse. To a buyer the percentage is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis population has some tendency for do; sativa lines show it more, for a simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to set it going, and a old that has waited past its intended finish often throws a few late male flowers on its own as a last effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa strain weak as a matter of course; it makes the grower’s consistency count over longer. A sealed room, stable temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is done rather than two weeks later remove most of the problem. A listing which states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on anything else.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and then kept and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and a note sharp that no other line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any cross which contains some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without parents may be mostly percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by local growers and climate alike, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range far more than in any tent-bred line, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a modern product. It carries habits that make sense in an equatorial field, including height that no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards indoor life; it is nearer to usable but still not a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” without a collection point and a reproduction history is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in high amounts in a lot of classic sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing people describe as a “sativa” aroma: green, piney, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, lost quickly by hot drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two things. When a listing names terpinolene among the leading terpene, the line most likely carries real old-sativa genetics whatever the percentage says. And when the grower are after that profile to still be there to the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene line to a flower that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to grow new bud growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a stress symptom, typically from light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a fault that was never not there, dropping lights and temperatures and slowing a long plant further. The breeder rarely warns which kind to expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines from regions where daylength barely varies through the year, and where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to changing days. Such lines often flower reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical response, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and gains an more clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the one most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with a ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also quote the shorter end of the spread, since the other end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is a sensible first pass for a room on a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is seldom caught out.
Latitude
The single number that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial lines require the run of shortening days to continue long enough for the plant ripen; at northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it rot in November. A closer to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and coastal or low-latitude gardens can finish lines that temperate growers never will.
The practical reading of a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step north of it moves the finish back towards the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.