Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary 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 a third to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, because it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the others.
Equatorial
Refers to lines out of regions where daylength hardly varies through the year, and that the plant never develop a sharp response to shortening days. Such plants frequently flower slowly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains an more clearer finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on origin misses the point hidden in it.
Haze
Originally a particular family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and something sharp that no other other line quite has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever cross that carries some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without parents could be mostly percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the grow character follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the single most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with a ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of the spread, because the longer end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is the sensible first pass for a room with a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack states is rarely caught out.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth that follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace lines triple. The stretch continues two to four weeks and will not be stopped once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is a fact worth reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming over from indica strains almost always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing category and not a measurable one. The phrase generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the description, and occasionally signals no more than a certain the buds are longer or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s other lines.
The experience people connect with the word, clear-headed rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy result and a good number of indica-labelled lines deliver exactly the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, typically from light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes weeks chasing a problem that is there, lowering lights and heat and delaying an already slow plant even more. The breeder seldom warns which type you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Latitude
The one figure that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and one that no pack states. Long-flowering lines need a run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal and subtropical growers are able to ripen lines that temperate growers cannot.
The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step north of that pushes the finish later into the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a better season.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in high amounts in many classic sativa lines and responsible for much of what people mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and it degrades more quickly in storage than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain most likely has substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be slow and cool; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene sativa to something that smells of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis population has some tendency for do; long-flowering plants express it more, for a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering to trigger it off, and a plant plant has already gone past its intended finish frequently produces a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a final attempt to make seed.
None of these makes a sativa line weak by course; it makes the grower’s discipline matter over a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, steady conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready and not two week after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for intersex traits is worth more on a sativa than on any other category.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by local climate and growers alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread widely than in any tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a finished product. It carries traits that make sense in an open field, including height that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to an daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards indoor life; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an collection region and a generation count is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged accordingly.