Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it means one 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 read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a «sativa-dominant» label taken as a statement of character, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, because it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the others.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to one region by local climate and climate alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and smells range far more than in any tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a finished product. It brings traits that make sense in an open field, such as a frame no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to a daylength most growers never provide. «Heirloom» in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over some generations, often with a degree of selection for tent life; it is closer to manageable but still not uniform. A seller listing «landrace» without an origin region and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Haze
In its first sense a specific line of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and a note sharp that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense «Haze» is any hybrid that contains some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says «Haze» and gives no lineage may be mostly percent original classic family or one small fraction of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in large proportion in many classic sativa strains and responsible for much of what growers mean as the «sativa» aroma: fresh, piney, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off easily through hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the label says. And where the grower are after that smell to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack described.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis line has a degree of tendency for do; sativa lines express it more often, and the reason is one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to set it going, and an old that has already waited past its natural end often produces a few late male flowers on its own in a final attempt to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa strain weak by course; it makes the grower’s discipline matter for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, stable conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is ready and not a weeks after take away most of the risk. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something more for a long-flowering line than on anything other category.
Equatorial
Describes plants from regions where daylength barely varies through the year, which means that the plant never develop a strong response to changing days. Such lines often flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, passed around between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys an earlier clearer finish. A listing that uses «equatorial» is telling you this with one word, and a grower who reads it as mere origin misses the instruction inside it.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, which is the single most frequently misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a «fourteen-week» sativa started with a ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also give the shorter end of a range, since the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this figure, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a stress response, typically caused by light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to occur under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a fault that was never not there, lowering lights and heat and slowing an already slow flower further. The breeder rarely says which type you should expect; the lineage usually does.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch continues two to four weeks and will not be halted after it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is a fact worth read ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term and not a measurable one. The phrase usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, and occasionally signals no more than a certain the flowers are longer or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with the word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is governed far more by terpene profile and the THC content than it is by ancestry, and a good number of «sativa-dominant» hybrids deliver a heavy couch effect while a good number of the opposite lines deliver exactly the reverse. For a grower the percentage is worth something for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Latitude
The one figure that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering lines need a autumn days to go on long enough for the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it to mould in November. A closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal and subtropical growers can finish plants that temperate gardens cannot.
The usable reading of a seed listing: an «outdoor» line harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere in southern Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it moves the date back into the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden is looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.