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, something else to a breeder and something different again to the grower standing in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: 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 modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, since it runs strongly to the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since not one of them makes usable on its own without the rest.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries a degree of tendency to do; sativa lines express it more, for one plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can trigger it going, and a old that has waited past its natural end frequently produces a few desperate pollen sacs on its own in a last effort to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the grower’s discipline matter for longer. A sealed room, steady conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is ready rather than two weeks later remove most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something more on a long-flowering line than for any else.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in high proportion in a lot of old sativa lines and responsible for most of what people describe as a “sativa” aroma: green, piney, lemon and slightly floral all at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and terpinolene fades faster during the cure than the heavier terpenes that lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead terpene, the line probably carries substantial old-sativa ancestry whatever the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line into a flower that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue category rather than a botanical one. The phrase generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa by whoever drafted the description, which sometimes signals nothing more than that the buds are airier or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with the word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy result and plenty of indica-labelled stock do exactly the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the single most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the optimistic end of a range, since the longer end sells less 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 about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the sensible first step if you have a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial lines go further. The stretch continues three to five weeks and will not be halted after it begins, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is a fact worth reading before choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica strains almost always switch far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Long-flowering lines need a run of shortening days to go on long enough for the plant ripen; in northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. A further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and Mediterranean and subtropical growers can finish lines that temperate gardens cannot.
The usable rule for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere in southern Europe or the western United States, and every degree further north of it pushes the finish later into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a longer season.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular place by local growers and growers together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas spread widely than in a tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a modern product. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, often with a degree of selection for tent conditions; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give an origin point and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Equatorial
Refers to lines out of latitudes where daylength hardly varies through the year, which means where the plant never evolved a strong reaction to shortening days. These lines frequently start flowering reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It loses some little yield and buys a more clearer end. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on geography has missed the point hidden in it.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out new bud growth on top of old ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, especially Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to occur in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes a month hunting a fault that is not there, lowering lights and heat and delaying a long flower further. The breeder seldom warns which type to expect; the lineage usually does.