Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The 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” label read as a description of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, since it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the category where the vocabulary matter most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, since none of them is usable on its own without the others.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over generations to a particular place by local growers and growers together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the heights, finishing times and smells range widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an open field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over a number of generations, typically with light selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give an origin region and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity for do; sativa lines show it more often, and the reason is a plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering to set it going, and a plant that has already gone past its intended finish often produces a few desperate pollen sacs on its own in a last attempt to make seed.
None of these makes a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the room’s discipline count over a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready and not a week later remove most of the problem. A listing that states the breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is saying something worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for anything other category.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial types triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be halted once it begins, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the number to reading before choosing when to switch. 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 has room. People moving from indica strains almost always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to grow fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to occur under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks chasing a fault that was never there, dropping lights and temperatures and slowing an already long plant further. The breeder rarely warns which type to expect; the parentage usually does.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that decides whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one that no pack states. Long-flowering lines require a autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in the end of October or else loses it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and coastal or subtropical growers are able to ripen plants that northern gardens never will.
The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree north of that moves the date back into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa outdoors is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, not a better summer.
Haze
In its first sense a particular line of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and something sharp that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross which carries some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without lineage may be eighty percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering character tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene found in large proportion in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for most of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, woody, lemon and faintly sweet at once. It is volatile, driven off easily through hot drying, and it degrades faster in the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain probably carries real Haze-era genetics whatever the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene sativa to something that smells of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category rather than a botanical one. It usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, and occasionally means no more than that the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with a word, lively rather than heavy, is governed more by terpene profile and by THC balance than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy sleepy result while a good number of the opposite lines deliver the reverse. To a buyer the label is useful as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the one most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For 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 eight-week vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a spread, because the longer end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.