Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, since it leans heavily to the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, since none of them is sense on its own without the others.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing category and not a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa according to whoever wrote the listing, and occasionally means no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with the word, lively rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by THC balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat sleepy result and a good number of the opposite lines do the opposite. For a grower the label is worth something as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the number worth read ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population has a degree of capacity to do; long-flowering plants express it more, and the reason is one simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to trigger it going, and an plant plant has waited beyond its natural finish often throws a few desperate pollen flowers on its own in a last attempt to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line weak as a matter of course; it means the grower’s consistency count for longer. Light-tight room, stable temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is done and not a weeks after remove most of the problem. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex traits is worth more on a sativa than on anything other category.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to one region by the local growers and climate together, and not by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread widely than a tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries traits that make sense in an open field, including a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to a daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to usable but still far from uniform. A shop listing “landrace” without an origin region and a reproduction history is using the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to push out new bud growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light too close or a room that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will occur in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends weeks chasing a fault that is a problem, lowering lights and heat and slowing a long plant further. The listing rarely says which kind you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Haze
In its first sense a particular line of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and a note metallic that no other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any cross which contains a share of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent original old family or one sixteenth of it, and the flowering character follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Equatorial
Refers to lines from regions where daylength barely varies across the year, and that the plant never evolved a strong response to shortening days. These plants frequently flower reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed around between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the last weeks. It loses some little yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the point hidden in it.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants require a run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in late October or else watches it to mould in November. A further south, in a northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and Mediterranean or low-latitude gardens are able to finish lines that northern growers cannot.
The practical rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere in temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree north of it pushes the date later towards the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer season.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene present in high proportion in many old sativa lines and responsible for most of what growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, woody, lemon and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during storage than the heavier terpenes that lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the line most likely carries substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the label says. And where the grower wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line into a flower that tastes of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.