Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary 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 a third to the grower standing in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it leans heavily towards the classic end of the category and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since none of them makes usable on its own without the others.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis line carries a degree of capacity to it; sativa lines show it more, and the reason is a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to set it off, and an old plant has waited beyond its natural finish often throws a few desperate pollen sacs on its own as a last effort to set seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it means the grower’s discipline count over a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, stable temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is ready and not a week after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that states the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing on a long-flowering line than on anything else.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace types go further. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is a number worth read before deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Haze
Originally a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something sharp that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any cross that contains a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” without parents could be mostly percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in high amounts in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for much of the thing growers describe as the “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily by hot drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain most likely has substantial old-sativa ancestry whatever the label says. And where the grower wants that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene line into something that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Equatorial
Describes lines out of regions in which daylength barely changes through the year, which means where the plant never develop a strong reaction to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical response, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses a yield yield and buys a earlier clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere origin misses the instruction inside it.
Latitude
The one figure that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Equatorial plants require the run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant to finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. A closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal and low-latitude growers can ripen lines that northern growers cannot.
The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree north of it moves the finish back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a better season.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through generations to a particular place by the local growers and growers together, and not by modern selection. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas range widely than a tent-bred line, and that spread is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is treating a landrace like a modern hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for some generations, often with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but still not uniform. A seller offering “landrace” without an collection point and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the one most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an eight-week vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also give the shorter end of a spread, since the other end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a sensible first step if you have a room on a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing term rather than a botanical one. The phrase usually means that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa by whoever drafted the description, which occasionally means no more than that the flowers are longer or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat sleepy effect and plenty of indica-labelled lines do exactly the opposite. For a grower the percentage is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is close to useless without the terpene description.