Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and a third to the grower standing in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, since it leans strongly towards the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since none of them is usable on its own without the others.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of existing ones, giving towered, irregular buds rather than round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, typically caused by light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to occur in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month chasing a problem that is not there, lowering lights and heat only slowing a slow plant further. The listing seldom says which type you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped through generations to a particular place by the local climate and climate alike, rather than by deliberate selection. Colombian, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas spread far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm set to a equatorial daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to manageable but still not uniform. A seller listing “landrace” without an collection region and a reproduction count is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
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 carries some tendency to it; sativa plants express it more, and the reason is one plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to set it going, and a plant plant has already waited past its natural finish frequently throws a few late male flowers on its own as a last attempt to make seed.
None of these makes a sativa strain unstable as a matter of course; it means the grower’s consistency matter over a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is ready rather than two week later take away the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex traits is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from latitudes where daylength hardly varies through the year, and that the plant does not develop a sharp response to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering slowly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical response, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses some little yield and gains a more decisive finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on origin misses the point inside it.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category and not a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, which occasionally signals no more than that the flowers are airier or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other releases.
The effect people connect with the word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is driven more by terpene profile and by cannabinoid content than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat sleepy result while a good number of indica-labelled lines do the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most misread number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of a spread, because the longer end sells less seed.
Sativa plants take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a reasonable first pass for a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Equatorial plants require a autumn days to go on long enough for the plant to ripen; in northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in late October or watches it to mould in November. A closer south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens can ripen lines that northern growers never will.
The usable rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line harvest date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of that pushes the finish back towards the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a better summer.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types triple. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the fact worth read before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in large proportion in a lot of old sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, woody, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off easily through fast drying, and terpinolene fades faster during the cure than the heavier terpenes which lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the line most likely has real Haze-era genetics whatever the percentage claims. And where the you are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene line to a flower that smells of hay and no trace of what the pack described.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai parents, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, pine and a note metallic that no other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage could be mostly percent the old family or one small fraction of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
