Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain 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 nearly always traces 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 character, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, because it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since none of them makes sense on its own without the rest.
Equatorial
Refers to lines from regions in which daylength hardly varies through the year, and that the plant never evolved a strong reaction to changing days. Such lines frequently flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day and not a signal.
The working fix, handed down among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the instruction inside it.
Latitude
The one figure that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial lines require the autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an unripe plant in the end of October or else watches it rot in November. A further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers can ripen plants that northern gardens never will.
The practical reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step further north of it pushes the date later into the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is shopping for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, not a longer season.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai landraces, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and something metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any cross that carries a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent the old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character follows the share, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial lines triple. The stretch continues two to four weeks and cannot be stopped once it has started, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is a fact to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming over from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over generations to one place by the local climate and climate alike, and not by deliberate selection. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range far more than in a tent-bred line, and that spread is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for some generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is closer to usable but still far from uniform. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give an origin point and a generation history is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be priced with that in mind.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing category and not a botanical one. The phrase generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, and occasionally means no more than a certain the flowers are longer or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s other releases.
The effect people connect with the word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and by cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat sleepy effect and plenty of the opposite lines deliver exactly the opposite. For a grower the percentage is useful for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is close to useless without the terpene notes.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most frequently misread number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of the range, since the other end moves fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines 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 after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the sensible first pass if you have a room on a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis line has some tendency to do; long-flowering lines express it more often, and the reason is one plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can trigger it going, and a plant plant has waited past its natural end often throws a few late pollen sacs on its own as a final attempt to set seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa strain weak by nature; it makes the room’s discipline matter for longer. A sealed tents, steady conditions and cutting when the plant is ready and not a weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing on a sativa than on anything other category.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in high amounts in many old sativa strains and accounting for much of what people describe as the “sativa” aroma: green, woody, lemon and faintly floral at once. It is fragile, driven off easily by fast drying, and it degrades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line probably carries substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the label says. And where the you wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene sativa into a flower that tastes of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack described.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to push out new bud growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a stress response, typically from light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is built in and will happen in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a fault that is there, lowering lights and heat and slowing a long flower even more. The listing rarely says which kind you should expect; the lineage generally tells you.