Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and a third to the person standing in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it leans strongly to the classic end of the category where the words matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them makes usable on its own without the rest.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues three to five weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is the number worth read before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a heat symptom, typically from light that is too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In many sativas, above all Thai and some Haze lines, it is built in and will happen under a flawless room. A new sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a problem that was never a problem, lowering lights and heat only slowing an already long plant even more. The breeder seldom says which kind you should expect; the lineage generally does.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue category rather than a botanical one. The phrase generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, and occasionally means nothing more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat sleepy effect while a good number of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the opposite. For a grower the percentage is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over generations to one place by the local growers and growers alike, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas range widely than a tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the whole value of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, often with light selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to usable but still far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” without a collection point and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in high proportion in a lot of old sativa strains and accounting for most of what people mean as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and slightly sweet all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by hot drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading terpene, the line most likely has substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the label claims. And when the you are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying has to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to something that smells of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Latitude
The single number that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Long-flowering lines need the autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost comes before that, 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 a northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal and subtropical growers can ripen plants that northern gardens cannot.
The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step north of it moves the finish back towards the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, and not a longer summer.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to lines from regions where daylength barely changes through the year, which means where the plant never develop a strong response to changing days. These plants frequently flower reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical response, handed down among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the final weeks. It costs a yield yield and gains an more decisive finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower who reads it as a note on origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with a ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally give the optimistic end of a range, because the other end sells less seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the sensible first pass for a room on a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is rarely caught out.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian parents, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and a note metallic that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any cross which carries a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.