Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of character, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it leans heavily to the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no particular order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the rest.
Equatorial
Describes plants from regions where daylength hardly changes across the year, and that the plant does not evolved a strong response to shortening days. Such plants often start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical response, handed around between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the last weeks. It loses a little yield and buys an earlier clearer end. A listing which says “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on origin misses the instruction hidden in it.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category and not a botanical one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, and occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people associate with the word, clear-headed rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy couch effect and plenty of the opposite lines do exactly the reverse. For a grower the label is useful as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is close to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in many old sativa strains and responsible for much of what growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, lemon and faintly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost easily through fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead terpene, the strain most likely has real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the label says. And when the you are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be cool and cool; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to something that smells of hay and nothing of what the pack described.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and will not be stopped after it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the fact worth reading ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood number 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 grown with an ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of the range, since the longer end moves less seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning lines it is a heat response, typically from 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 Thai and some Haze lines, it is built in and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month chasing a problem that is there, dropping lights and heat and delaying an already long flower even more. The listing seldom warns which type you should expect; the lineage usually does.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and something sharp that no other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that carries a share of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” without parents may be eighty percent the classic family or a small fraction of it, and the flowering character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to one place by local climate and growers together, rather than by modern selection. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas range widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is treating a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made 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 never offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards indoor conditions; it is nearer to usable but still far from a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give an origin region and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis line has some tendency for it; long-flowering lines express it more often, for a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can set it off, and a old plant has already gone past its natural finish often produces a few late pollen sacs on its own in a last effort to make seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa line weak as a matter of course; it means the grower’s discipline count for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, stable conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is ready rather than two weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something more for a sativa than for anything other category.
Latitude
The single number that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Long-flowering lines need the autumn days to continue late enough for the plant ripen; in northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in the end of October or else watches it rot in November. The further south, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers can finish lines that temperate gardens never will.
The usable rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of it moves the finish later into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a longer season.