Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow usually traces 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” label read as a statement of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, because it leans heavily to 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 special order, since not one of them is usable without the rest.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis line has some tendency for it; long-flowering plants express it more often, for a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to trigger it going, and an old that has gone beyond its intended finish frequently produces a few desperate pollen sacs on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
None of this means a sativa strain unstable by nature; it means the room’s discipline matter over longer. Light-tight room, stable conditions and harvesting when the plant is ready rather than a weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something more on a long-flowering line than on anything else.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to plants out of latitudes in which daylength hardly changes across the year, which means that the plant never develop a sharp response to shortening days. Such plants frequently start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working fix, handed down between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and gains a earlier clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on geography has missed the instruction inside it.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped through generations to one region by the local climate and growers alike, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas spread widely than any tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an equatorial field, including a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor life; it is closer to manageable but still far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give a origin region and a reproduction history is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian parents, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and a note metallic that no line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid that contains some of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” without lineage could be eighty percent original classic family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A catalogue term rather than a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, and occasionally means nothing more than a certain the buds are longer or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s other lines.
The experience people connect with the word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by THC balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy couch result while a good number of the opposite lines do the reverse. For a grower the percentage is useful as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is close to useless without the terpene description.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx growth on top of old ones, giving towered, open buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress response, usually caused by light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently spends weeks chasing a problem that is there, lowering lights and heat only slowing a long flower even more. The listing seldom says which type you should expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in high amounts in many classic sativa lines and accounting for much of what people describe as a “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost quickly by fast drying, and it fades faster in storage than the heavier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the leading terpene, the strain probably has substantial old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line to a flower that tastes of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack promised.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth that follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace types triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is a number worth reading before choosing when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica strains almost always flip too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that determines if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Long-flowering plants need a autumn days to continue late enough for the plant ripen; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in the end of October or else watches it rot in November. The closer to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers can finish plants that temperate gardens cannot.
The usable reading of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of it moves the finish later into the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors is shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer season.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of the range, since the longer end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack states is rarely disappointed.