Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of character, a landrace bought as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it runs strongly to the classic end of the spectrum where the words matter most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since not one of them makes sense without the rest.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis line carries some tendency for do; long-flowering plants show it more often, for one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can trigger it going, and a old that has already waited beyond its intended end often produces a few desperate male flowers on its own in a final effort to make seed.
None of this makes a sativa line weak by course; it means the grower’s consistency count for longer. A sealed tents, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready and not two weeks after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something more for a sativa than for any other category.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The marketing term and not a botanical one. It usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to whoever wrote the listing, and sometimes means no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell brighter than the same breeder’s other lines.
The experience people associate with a word, lively rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and the THC balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy couch result while plenty of indica-labelled lines do exactly the opposite. To a grower the label is useful as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to effect it is next to useless without the aroma description.
Haze
Originally a specific line of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and something metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the single most frequently 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 a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of a range, because the longer end sells less seed.
Long-flowering plants take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower with a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is rarely caught out.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing people mean as the “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, lemon and faintly floral all at once. It is volatile, lost quickly by fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during storage than the earthier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. When a listing names terpinolene among the lead aromas, the line most likely has substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that smell to survive to the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene line to a flower that tastes of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through generations to one place by local climate and growers together, and not by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread far more than in a tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern product. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, such as a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm set to an daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin over a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection towards indoor life; it is closer to usable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give a origin point and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Long-flowering plants need the autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in the end of October or watches it to mould in November. A closer to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens are able to ripen plants that northern growers never will.
The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step further north of it pushes the finish later into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden is shopping for an autoflower or a covered space, and not a better summer.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth that comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace types go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is a fact to reading ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to grow fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a stress symptom, usually from light too close or a room that is too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is built in and is going to happen under a flawless room. A new sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a fault that is not there, lowering lights and heat and slowing an already long flower further. The listing seldom warns which kind you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines from regions in which daylength barely changes across the year, and where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. These plants often start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the last weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains a more clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower who reads it as a note on origin misses the point hidden in it.