Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a «sativa-dominant» label read as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it leans strongly to the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since none of them makes usable without the rest.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa started after an ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally give the optimistic end of a range, since the other end moves fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the reasonable first step for a room on a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue term rather than a measurable one. It usually means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were described as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the description, which occasionally means nothing more than a certain the buds are longer or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people connect with a word, lively rather than heavy, is governed far more by terpene profile and by THC content than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» releases deliver a flat sleepy effect and a good number of indica-labelled lines deliver exactly the opposite. To a buyer the percentage is useful as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to plants out of latitudes in which daylength barely varies across the year, and where the plant does not evolved a strong reaction to changing days. Such lines frequently flower slowly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, passed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the last weeks. It costs a little yield and buys an more decisive end. A listing which says «equatorial» is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere geography misses the instruction hidden in it.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of existing ones, giving spired, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress response, typically from light too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and will happen in a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes a month chasing a fault that was never there, dropping lights and heat only slowing an already slow flower even more. The breeder seldom warns which type to expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial types triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be halted after it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is a fact to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis population carries a degree of tendency to it; sativa lines express it more often, for a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to trigger it going, and an old that has already waited beyond its natural end frequently produces a few desperate male flowers on its own as a final attempt to set seed.
Not one of these means a sativa strain weak by nature; it makes the grower’s consistency count over longer. Light-tight tents, stable temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is done and not two weeks later take away most of the problem. A listing which states a breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is worth more on a sativa than on any else.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A terpene found in large proportion in a lot of classic sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing people mean as the «sativa» smell: fresh, piney, citrus and faintly sweet at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes which lead indica-leaning stock.
To a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing names terpinolene as the leading aromas, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And where the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be slow and cool; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Haze
Originally a specific line of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and something metallic that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense «Haze» is whatever hybrid which carries a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads «Haze» without parents may be mostly percent original old family or one sixteenth of it, and the flowering time tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and via which parent».
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over centuries to one place by local growers and climate together, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and smells spread widely than in any tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a daylength most growers never offer. «Heirloom» on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection for tent life; it is nearer to usable but still far from a hybrid. A shop offering «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.
Latitude
The single number that decides if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one no pack states. Long-flowering plants need the run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A further south, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and Mediterranean and low-latitude growers can ripen plants that temperate gardens never will.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an «outdoor» line harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it pushes the finish later into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or a covered space, not a longer season.