Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached 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 grower standing in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, since it leans strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no particular order, because not one of them makes sense without the rest.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number no pack states. Equatorial plants need a run of shortening days to go on long enough for the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A further south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and coastal or subtropical growers are able to ripen plants that temperate growers never will.
The usable reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of that moves the date back towards the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in large amounts in many classic sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as a “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is fragile, lost easily by fast drying, and it fades faster in storage than the heavier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene as the lead aromas, the line most likely has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the percentage claims. And where the you wants that smell to survive by the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack described.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to one place by the local climate and climate alike, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas spread far more than any tent-bred line, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a modern product. It brings habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for a number of generations, often with light selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but still not a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give a origin region and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and will not be stopped once it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is the number to read before deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica strains nearly always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian parents, and then kept and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any cross that carries a share of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A marketing term rather than a botanical one. The phrase generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the description, which sometimes signals nothing more than that the buds are airier or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with the word, lively rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy couch effect and a good number of the opposite lines do exactly the opposite. For a buyer the percentage is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is next to worthless without the terpene description.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to grow new calyx clusters on top of existing ones, giving towered, irregular buds instead of round ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a stress symptom, usually caused by light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is genetic and will happen in a perfect room. A new sativa grower often wastes a month hunting a fault that was never a problem, dropping lights and heat and delaying a long plant even more. The breeder rarely says which type to expect; the parentage usually does.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis population has some capacity for it; long-flowering plants show it more often, and the reason is one simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to set it going, and a old plant has already gone beyond its intended finish frequently throws a few desperate male sacs on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa line weak by nature; it makes the grower’s discipline count over longer. Light-tight tents, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not two weeks after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing which states a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something more for a long-flowering line than on any other category.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally quote the optimistic end of the spread, because the other end sells less seed.
Sativa plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is a sensible first pass for a room on a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Equatorial
Describes plants from regions in which daylength barely varies across the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a strong reaction to shortening days. These plants frequently flower slowly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working fix, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the last weeks. It costs a little yield and gains a more decisive finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on geography has missed the instruction inside it.