Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the grower standing in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of character, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it leans strongly towards the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since not one of them makes sense on its own without the others.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for most of what people mean as a “sativa” aroma: green, woody, lemon and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and it degrades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the word does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain probably carries substantial old-sativa genetics whatever the percentage claims. And where the grower are after that smell to survive to the jar, the cure has to be slow and cool; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene line to something that smells of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line has some capacity for do; sativa plants show it more often, and the reason is one plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it off, and an old that has already waited beyond its intended finish often throws a few desperate male flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the grower’s discipline matter over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable conditions and cutting the moment the plant is done and not a week after take away the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is worth worth hearing for a sativa than for anything other category.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, which is the one most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also give the shorter end of the spread, because the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is the reasonable first pass for a grower with a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to push out new bud growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than round ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a heat response, usually from light too close or a room too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and will happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a problem that was never a problem, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already long flower further. The breeder rarely warns which type to expect; the lineage generally does.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing term rather than a measurable one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the description, which occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other lines.
The effect people connect with a word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat couch effect while plenty of indica-labelled lines do the opposite. For a buyer the label is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering lines need a run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant to ripen; in high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it to mould in November. The further south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and coastal and low-latitude gardens are able to finish plants that temperate gardens cannot.
The practical rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree north of that pushes the date back into the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a longer season.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues three to five weeks and will not be halted once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is a number worth read before deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming over from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Equatorial
Describes lines from latitudes in which daylength hardly varies across the year, and that the plant does not develop a strong reaction to changing days. These lines often flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed around between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the last weeks. It costs a little yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere geography has missed the point inside it.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian landraces, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and something metallic that no line quite has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without parents could be eighty percent original classic family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering character tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.