Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow nearly always 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” label read as a description of character, a landrace bought as if 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 runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the words matter most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since none of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular place by the local climate and climate alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas spread widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the point of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, often with light selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” without an collection region and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound present in high proportion in a lot of classic sativa lines and accounting for much of what people mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, piney, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost easily by hot drying, and it degrades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain most likely carries substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And where the grower wants that smell to survive to the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line into a flower that tastes of hay and no trace of what the pack described.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Equatorial lines require a run of shortening days to continue long enough for the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an unripe plant in late October or watches it rot in November. The closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and coastal and subtropical gardens are able to finish lines that temperate growers never will.
The usable rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of it pushes the date back into the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or a covered space, and not a better summer.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something sharp that no other other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which contains a share of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent the classic family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering character follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misread figure on a sativa pack. For 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 ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally give the shorter end of a range, since the other end moves fewer seed.
Sativa lines run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is the sensible first pass for a room with a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is rarely caught out.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to push out fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, giving towered, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, typically from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and some Haze lines, it is built in and is going to happen under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes weeks chasing a fault that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and slowing a slow flower further. The breeder seldom says which type to expect; the lineage generally does.
Equatorial
Refers to lines out of regions where daylength hardly varies through the year, and that the plant never develop a sharp response to shortening days. These lines frequently start flowering reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The practical fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the final weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys a earlier clearer end. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the point inside it.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing category rather than a botanical one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the description, and sometimes signals no more than that the flowers are longer or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with a word, clear-headed rather than sedating, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat couch effect and plenty of the opposite stock do exactly the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to useless without the aroma description.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines go further. The stretch continues three to five weeks and will not be halted once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is the number worth reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
