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 seed company and a third to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, since it runs heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, since not one of them makes usable without the others.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular place by the local climate and climate together, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread widely than a tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a modern product. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “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 for indoor life; it is closer to manageable but still not uniform. A seller listing “landrace” without a origin region and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
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 population carries some tendency to it; sativa plants express it more, for a plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it going, and an old plant has already gone past its natural end often throws a few late male flowers on its own in a final effort to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa strain unstable by nature; it means the grower’s consistency count for a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is ready rather than two weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for any else.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in large proportion in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for most of what growers mean as the “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly through fast drying, and it degrades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the line probably carries real Haze-era ancestry whatever the label claims. And where the grower are after that profile to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the single most frequently misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of the range, since the other end sells less seed.
Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is the sensible first pass if you have a room with a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to push out new bud clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a stress response, typically caused by light too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and some Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to occur under a flawless room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes weeks hunting a fault that was never not there, dropping lights and temperatures only slowing a long plant further. The listing rarely says which kind you should expect; the parentage usually tells you.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be stopped once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is a fact to reading before choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that decides if a sativa can finish outdoors, and one that no pack states. Long-flowering lines need a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in late October or watches it to mould in November. The further south, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean or low-latitude growers can ripen lines that temperate growers cannot.
The practical reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree further north of it pushes the finish later into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden is shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better summer.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and Thai parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and something sharp that no other other line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which contains a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage could be eighty percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the grow character follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Equatorial
Describes lines from regions in which daylength barely varies across the year, which means that the plant does not develop a sharp response to changing days. These plants frequently flower reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working response, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs a yield yield and buys a earlier decisive finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on origin has missed the point hidden in it.