Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means 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 listing. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a statement of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it leans strongly towards the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, because not one of them is usable on its own without the others.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, and 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, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with a eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally give the optimistic end of a spread, since the other end sells less seed.
Sativa plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in 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 room with a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted through generations to one region by the local climate and growers together, rather than by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas range far more than any tent-bred line, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a modern product. It brings habits that make sense in an open field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over some generations, often with a degree of selection for tent life; it is nearer to usable but still not uniform. A shop listing “landrace” without a collection point and a generation history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced with that in mind.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis line carries some tendency to it; sativa lines show it more often, for one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to trigger it off, and a old plant has waited past its natural finish frequently throws a few desperate pollen sacs on its own as a final attempt to set seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa strain weak by course; it makes the grower’s discipline matter over longer. A sealed room, stable temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is done and not two weeks after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more for a sativa than for anything other category.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to plants out of regions where daylength barely varies across the year, and that the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. These lines often flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working response, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses some little yield and buys an earlier clearer end. A listing which says “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on origin has missed the point hidden in it.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches openly, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something sharp that no line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid which contains some of that family, which by now is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage could be mostly percent the old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out new bud clusters on top of old ones, producing spired, irregular buds rather than round ones. In most indica-leaning strains it is a stress symptom, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is built in and is going to occur under a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a fault that was never there, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying a slow plant further. The listing seldom warns which type to expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth that follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types triple. The stretch continues two to four weeks and will not be halted once it begins, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is the number to read before deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains almost always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude
The one number that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one that no pack states. Equatorial plants need a autumn days to continue long enough to let the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in late October or loses it rot in November. A further to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and Mediterranean and subtropical gardens can ripen plants that temperate gardens never will.
The usable rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step north of that moves the date later into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a better summer.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of classic sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing people mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is fragile, lost quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.
To a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading aromas, the line most likely has substantial old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And where the you wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa into something that tastes of very little and no trace of what the pack described.