A Working Glossary for Sativa Seed Buyers
Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it leans heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category where the words matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, because none of them makes usable on its own without the others.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity for do; long-flowering plants express it more, and the reason is a simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can set it off, and an old plant has waited past its intended end frequently produces a few desperate male flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these means a sativa strain weak as a matter of course; it means the room’s discipline count over longer. Light-tight tents, stable conditions and harvesting when the plant is done rather than a week after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is worth worth hearing on a sativa than on anything else.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace types triple. The stretch continues two to four weeks and cannot be stopped once it has started, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is the fact to read before deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also give the shorter end of the range, since the longer end moves less seed.
Sativa plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by this figure, which is a sensible first pass for a room with a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Equatorial lines need the autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. The further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and coastal and low-latitude gardens can finish plants that northern growers cannot.
The usable reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere in temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of that moves the finish back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa outdoors is shopping for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, not a longer season.
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 worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note sharp that no other line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that carries a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering time tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to a particular region by the local growers and growers together, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread far more than in a tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace like a modern product. It brings habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to an daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for a number of generations, often with a degree of selection for indoor life; it is closer to manageable but still far from uniform. A shop offering “landrace” without an origin point and a generation history is using the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing category rather than a measurable one. It generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa by whoever wrote the description, which occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by THC content than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat sleepy effect while a good number of the opposite stock deliver the opposite. To a grower the label is worth something for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to effect it is next to worthless without the terpene description.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to grow fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress response, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and will happen under a flawless room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks hunting a fault that was never a problem, dropping lights and temperatures and delaying a long flower even more. The breeder seldom warns which kind to expect; the lineage usually does.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in large proportion in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for much of the thing growers mean as a “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily by hot drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly during the cure than the heavier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line most likely carries substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the label claims. And where the grower are after that smell to still be there to the jar, the drying is going to be cool and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Equatorial
Refers to plants out of latitudes in which daylength barely varies across the year, which means where the plant does not develop a strong reaction to changing days. Such plants frequently start flowering slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the final weeks. It costs some little yield and gains a more decisive end. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on geography misses the instruction hidden in it.
