Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it means one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the grower standing in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a «sativa-dominant» label taken as a description of character, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, because it leans strongly towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, because not one of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Equatorial lines need the autumn days to go on late enough for the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or watches it to mould in November. A further to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and coastal or subtropical growers are able to finish lines 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, usually a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of it moves the finish back into the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better season.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The marketing term and not a botanical one. The phrase usually means that more of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by whoever drafted the description, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s other releases.
The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» releases produce a heavy sleepy effect while a good number of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the reverse. To a grower the percentage is worth something for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to useless without the terpene description.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over generations to one region by local climate and climate alike, rather than by modern selection. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas range far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the point of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a modern hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, such as a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a daylength most growers cannot offer. «Heirloom» in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection for tent life; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A shop listing «landrace» without an origin region and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, and the one most frequently misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a «fourteen-week» sativa started after a eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of the spread, since the other end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the reasonable first step if you have a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Haze
Originally a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and then kept and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something metallic that no other other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense «Haze» is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads «Haze» without lineage could be eighty percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis line has a degree of tendency to do; long-flowering lines express it more, for a simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can trigger it off, and a plant that has already waited beyond its intended finish often throws a few late pollen flowers on its own in a last effort to make seed.
None of this makes a sativa strain unstable as a matter of nature; it means the grower’s consistency matter over longer. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not two weeks after remove most of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A terpene present in high proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for much of what growers mean as a «sativa» aroma: green, piney, citrus and faintly sweet at once. It is fragile, lost easily through fast drying, and it fades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning stock.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the line probably has substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the percentage says. And where the you wants that profile to survive by the jar, the drying is going to be cool and slow; a fast dry turns a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace lines triple. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is the fact worth read before choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving over from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Equatorial
Describes lines out of latitudes in which daylength barely varies across the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a strong reaction to changing days. These plants often start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The practical response, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and gains a earlier decisive finish. A listing that says «equatorial» is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to push out new bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds rather than round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen in a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends a month hunting a fault that is not a problem, dropping lights and heat and delaying an already long flower even more. The listing seldom warns which kind you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.