Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other category 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 goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it runs heavily towards the classic 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, because not one of them makes usable without the others.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted through generations to one region by the local growers and growers alike, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas range widely than a tent-bred line, and this spread is the point of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a modern hybrid. It brings traits that made sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a equatorial daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for some generations, typically with light selection towards indoor life; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an origin point and a reproduction history is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a particular family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and something metallic that no other line quite has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent the old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth which follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few equatorial lines go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and will not be stopped once it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is a fact worth reading before choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally quote the optimistic end of a spread, because the other end moves fewer seed.
Sativa lines take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line 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 reasonable first pass if you have a grower with a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Equatorial
Describes plants from latitudes where daylength hardly changes across the year, and where the plant does not develop a sharp response to shortening days. These lines often start flowering reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It costs some yield yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on geography has missed the point inside it.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population has some tendency for do; sativa plants show it more often, and the reason is a simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to set it going, and an plant that has already waited past its intended end often throws a few late male sacs on its own as a final attempt to make seed.
None of these makes a sativa line unstable by nature; it makes the room’s discipline matter over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not two weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing on a sativa than for any other category.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that decides if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require a autumn days to go on long enough for the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it to mould in November. A further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal and low-latitude gardens are able to ripen lines that temperate growers never will.
The usable rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree north of that pushes the finish back towards the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a better summer.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in many old sativa lines and responsible for much of what people describe as the “sativa” smell: green, woody, lemon and slightly sweet at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and it degrades faster during storage than the heavier terpenes which lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name earns two things. When a listing lists terpinolene as the lead aromas, the line probably carries substantial old-sativa genetics whatever the percentage says. And when the you wants that smell to survive by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx clusters on top of existing ones, giving spired, irregular buds rather than round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning lines it is a stress response, usually from light too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is built in and will occur under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a fault that is there, dropping lights and heat only slowing an already long flower even more. The listing rarely says which kind you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.
