Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since not one of them is sense on its own without the others.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with a eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the optimistic end of the range, because the longer end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the sensible first step if you have a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack states is rarely caught out.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large amounts in many classic sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing growers describe as a “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, driven off easily by hot drying, and it degrades faster in the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the lead terpene, the strain probably carries real Haze-era genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa into something that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types triple. The stretch continues two to four weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is the number to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population carries some tendency to it; long-flowering lines show it more often, and the reason is one plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to trigger it off, and a old plant has waited beyond its intended finish frequently throws a few desperate pollen flowers on its own in a last effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa strain unstable by course; it makes the grower’s discipline count over a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable conditions and cutting when the plant is done rather than two week later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which states a breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on any else.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to one place by the local climate and climate alike, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells range widely than any tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a equatorial daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for a number of generations, typically with light selection towards tent life; it is closer to usable but still not a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without a collection region and a reproduction history is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to grow fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will occur under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often wastes a month chasing a problem that is a problem, dropping lights and heat only delaying an already slow plant further. The breeder rarely warns which kind you should expect; the lineage generally does.
Haze
Originally a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note sharp that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever cross that contains a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without parents could be eighty percent the old family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering character follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes plants out of regions where daylength barely varies through the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. Such lines frequently start flowering reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical response, passed down between sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the final weeks. It costs some little yield and buys an earlier clearer finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin has missed the point inside it.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that determines if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one no pack states. Equatorial lines require a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant to finish; at high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in the end of October or else loses it to mould in November. The closer south, in the northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and coastal and low-latitude growers can finish plants that northern growers never will.
The practical reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point within southern Europe or the western United States, and every step north of that moves the finish later towards the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors is shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a better season.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A catalogue category rather than a botanical one. It usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa by whoever drafted the description, which occasionally means no more than a certain the buds are airier or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene profile and by THC balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy couch result while plenty of indica-labelled lines deliver the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
