Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, 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 open for reference, since it leans heavily to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, since none of them makes sense without the others.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term rather than a botanical one. The phrase usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, which occasionally means no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people associate with a word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is driven more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid content than by ancestry, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» releases produce a heavy couch effect while plenty of the opposite lines deliver exactly the reverse. For a grower the percentage is worth something as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, and the single 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 sowing, so a «fourteen-week» sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the optimistic end of a spread, since the other end sells less seed.
Sativa plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the reasonable first pass for a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Latitude
The single number that determines whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one no pack prints. Equatorial plants need a run of shortening days to continue long enough to let the plant to ripen; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in late October or else watches it to mould in November. A closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and Mediterranean and subtropical growers can ripen lines that northern gardens cannot.
The usable rule for a seed listing: an «outdoor» line harvest month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within southern Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of that pushes the finish later towards the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa outdoors is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a longer season.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx growth on top of old ones, producing spired, irregular buds rather than round ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and some Haze lines, it is genetic and will occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks hunting a problem that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying an already long plant further. The breeder seldom warns which kind to expect; the lineage usually does.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to one place by local growers and climate alike, and not by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and smells range widely than in a tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers never provide. «Heirloom» on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for some generations, often with light selection for indoor conditions; it is closer to manageable but still not a hybrid. A shop offering «landrace» that does not give a origin point and a generation history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from regions where daylength barely changes through the year, and that the plant does not evolved a strong reaction to shortening days. These lines often flower slowly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The practical fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the final weeks. It loses a little yield and buys a earlier clearer finish. A listing which says «equatorial» is telling you about this with one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography misses the point hidden in it.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in high amounts in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for most of what people describe as the «sativa» smell: green, piney, lemon and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster in the cure than the heavier terpenes which dominate most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain most likely has real old-sativa genetics regardless of what the label says. And when the you wants that smell to survive by the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene line into something that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack described.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense «Haze» is any hybrid that contains a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which reads «Haze» and gives no lineage could be mostly percent the old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity to it; sativa lines express it more often, and the reason is a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can trigger it off, and an old plant has already waited beyond its intended finish frequently produces a few desperate pollen flowers on its own in a final effort to set seed.
Not one of this means a sativa strain unstable by nature; it means the room’s consistency count for a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready and not two week after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something more for a long-flowering line than on anything other category.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth that follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial lines triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and will not be halted after it begins, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is the fact to read before choosing when to flip. A sativa switched 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 over from indica stock nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.