Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the grower standing in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a «sativa-dominant» label read as a statement of character, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, because it leans strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since none of them makes usable without the others.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line carries some capacity to it; sativa lines express it more, for one simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it off, and an plant that has already gone beyond its intended finish frequently throws a few desperate male flowers on its own as a last effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line unstable as a matter of nature; it makes the grower’s consistency matter for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, steady conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is ready rather than a week after remove most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on any else.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific family of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and a note sharp that no other other line quite has.
In its looser sense «Haze» is whatever cross which contains a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads «Haze» without parents may be eighty percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is not «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Latitude
The single number that decides if a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial lines need a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; at high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in the end of October or else loses it rot in November. A further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal or low-latitude growers are able to ripen plants that temperate gardens cannot.
The usable reading of a seed pack: an «outdoor» sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step north of that moves the finish back into the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth that comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and will not be stopped once it has started, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is the fact worth reading ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular place by the local growers and growers together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas range far more than a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, such as a frame no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. «Heirloom» in a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless not uniform. A shop offering «landrace» without a collection region and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the single most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a «fourteen-week» sativa grown with an eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the shorter end of a spread, because the longer end sells fewer seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is a sensible first step for a grower on a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high amounts in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for most of the thing people describe as a «sativa» smell: green, piney, lemon and slightly sweet at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and it fades faster in the cure than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name earns two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain most likely has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the percentage says. And when the grower are after that smell to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line into a flower that tastes of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack described.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of regions where daylength barely changes through the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a sharp response to shortening days. These lines often start flowering slowly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the final weeks. It costs a little yield and buys a earlier decisive finish. A listing that uses «equatorial» is warning you this with one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on origin misses the instruction inside it.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of existing ones, giving towered, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress symptom, typically from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a fault that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and slowing an already slow plant further. The breeder seldom warns which type to expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term rather than a botanical one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa according to whoever wrote the listing, which sometimes signals no more than that the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid content than by ancestry, and a good number of «sativa-dominant» hybrids deliver a heavy couch effect while plenty of the opposite lines deliver exactly the opposite. To a buyer the percentage is worth something as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to worthless without the terpene notes.