Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, since it runs heavily to the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, since none of them makes sense without the rest.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis line carries some capacity for do; sativa lines express it more, for one plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering to trigger it off, and an plant that has already gone past its intended finish frequently throws a few late male flowers on its own in a final attempt to set seed.
None of these makes a sativa line unstable by nature; it means the room’s discipline matter over longer. A sealed tents, steady conditions and cutting when the plant is ready rather than a weeks after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that states a breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something more for a sativa than on any other category.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth which follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial lines triple. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and will not be halted once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is a number to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock almost always flip too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over centuries to one place by the local growers and climate alike, and not by modern breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread widely than a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to usable but still not a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without a origin point and a generation count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and a note sharp that no other line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which contains some of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” without parents may be mostly percent the old family or one sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the share, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Equatorial
Refers to lines out of regions where daylength hardly changes through the year, which means that the plant never evolved a strong response to shortening days. These lines frequently start flowering slowly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day and not a signal.
The working response, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs some little yield and buys a more clearer finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on geography has missed the point inside it.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in large amounts in many old sativa lines and responsible for much of the thing people describe as the “sativa” aroma: green, woody, citrus and faintly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost quickly by fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster in storage than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. When a listing names terpinolene among the leading terpene, the line probably has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that profile to still be there to the jar, the drying is going to be cool and cool; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene line to a flower that smells of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack promised.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term rather than a botanical one. The phrase usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, and sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people associate with the word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a flat sleepy result and plenty of the opposite lines do the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is next to worthless without the aroma description.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misread figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally quote the shorter end of a range, since the other end sells less seed.
Sativa lines take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this figure, which is a reasonable first step for a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely caught out.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering lines require a autumn days to go on long enough for the plant finish; at northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. The closer to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens are able to ripen lines that temperate growers never will.
The practical reading of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree further north of that pushes the date back into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer season.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, usually caused by light too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and will happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a problem that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and slowing an already slow plant further. The listing seldom warns which type to expect; the lineage generally does.