Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, because not one of them is sense without the rest.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with an ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the optimistic end of the range, because the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the sensible first pass for a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular region by local growers and growers together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Thai, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and smells range widely than a tent-bred line, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, often with light selection towards tent life; it is nearer to manageable but still far from a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give a origin region and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to plants out of regions where daylength barely changes through the year, which means where the plant does not develop a strong response to shortening days. Such plants often start flowering reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working fix, handed down among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the last weeks. It loses some little yield and gains an more decisive end. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Haze
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian landraces, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and a note metallic that no line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross that contains a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage may be mostly percent the old family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering character follows the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line carries some capacity for do; long-flowering lines show it more, and the reason is one simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and an old that has already waited beyond its natural end often throws a few late pollen sacs on its own in a last attempt to make seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa strain weak by nature; it means the grower’s discipline matter over longer. Light-tight room, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready rather than a weeks after take away most of the problem. A listing that states the breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is worth worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth that follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace types go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is the number to read ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in large amounts in many old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly in the cure than the heavier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the word earns two things. When a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain probably carries real Haze-era genetics regardless of what the label claims. And where the grower wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa into something that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term and not a botanical one. It usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, which sometimes means no more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people connect with a word, lively rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by THC balance than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy couch result and a good number of indica-labelled stock do the opposite. To a buyer the percentage is useful for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless without the terpene description.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to push out new bud growth on top of old ones, producing spired, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress response, usually caused by light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and will occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month chasing a fault that is not a problem, lowering lights and heat and delaying a long flower further. The listing rarely says which type to expect; the lineage generally does.
Latitude
The one number that determines whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants need the run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. The closer south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and coastal or low-latitude growers can ripen lines that northern growers never will.
The usable reading of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree north of it pushes the finish later towards the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden is looking for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, and not a longer summer.
