Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category 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 grower trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow usually 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» label taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, since it leans heavily to the classic end of the category where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since not one of them makes usable without the rest.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of spice, pine and a note sharp that no other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense «Haze» is any hybrid which carries a share of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says «Haze» without parents could be mostly percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa started with a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also quote the shorter end of a range, because the longer end sells less seed.
Sativa plants take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a reasonable first step for a room on a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Long-flowering plants need a run of shortening days to continue late enough to let the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in the end of October or else loses it rot in November. The further south, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and coastal or subtropical growers can ripen lines that northern gardens cannot.
The practical rule of a seed listing: an «outdoor» sativa harvest date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of that pushes the date back into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, not a better season.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity to it; long-flowering lines show it more often, and the reason is one simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can set it going, and a old plant has waited beyond its intended end often produces a few late male flowers on its own in a last effort to set seed.
None of these makes a sativa line unstable by course; it means the room’s discipline count over longer. A sealed tents, stable conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is done and not two weeks later remove most of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on any other category.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A aromatic compound found in large proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing people describe as a «sativa» aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly through hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word earns two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain probably carries real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And where the grower are after that profile to survive by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene line to something that tastes of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack promised.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial lines triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it begins, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the number to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one place by the local climate and climate together, rather than by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells range widely than a tent-bred line, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries traits that make sense in an open field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to an equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. «Heirloom» in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for some generations, often with a degree of selection towards indoor conditions; it is nearer to manageable but still far from a hybrid. A seller offering «landrace» without an collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to grow fresh bud growth on top of old ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress response, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In many sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and will occur under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month chasing a fault that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying an already long flower even more. The listing seldom warns which type you should expect; the parentage generally does.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes plants out of latitudes in which daylength barely changes through the year, and that the plant never evolved a sharp response to changing days. Such lines often flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The working response, handed down among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs some little yield and gains an more clearer end. A listing that uses «equatorial» is telling you about this in one word, and a grower that reads it as mere origin has missed the point hidden in it.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category rather than a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the listing, and occasionally means nothing more than that the buds are longer or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by THC balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» hybrids deliver a heavy couch result while a good number of indica-labelled lines deliver the reverse. For a buyer the label is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless without the terpene description.