Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder 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 sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of character, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it runs strongly towards the classic end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since none of them makes usable on its own without the others.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace lines go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is a number worth read before choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat symptom, typically caused by light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Thai and some Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks hunting a fault that is there, lowering lights and heat and delaying an already slow plant even more. The breeder rarely says which type you should expect; the lineage usually does.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis line carries some capacity to do; long-flowering lines express it more often, and the reason is a simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to trigger it off, and an plant plant has waited beyond its intended end often produces a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a final attempt to set seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it makes the room’s discipline matter over longer. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done rather than a week later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing for a sativa than for anything else.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular region by local climate and climate together, and not by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas spread widely than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a modern product. It brings traits that made sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to an daylength most growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin over some generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor life; it is nearer to manageable but still far from uniform. A seller offering “landrace” without an origin point and a reproduction history is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category rather than a measurable one. The phrase usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage were described as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the listing, which occasionally means nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid content than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy couch result and plenty of the opposite stock deliver exactly the opposite. To a grower the label is worth something as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and a note sharp that no other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any cross which contains a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says “Haze” without parents could be mostly percent original classic family or one small fraction of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound found in high proportion in a lot of old sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing growers describe as a “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, citrus and slightly sweet at once. It is volatile, driven off easily by hot drying, and terpinolene fades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain probably carries substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the label says. And where the grower are after that smell to survive by the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene line to something that smells of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from latitudes in which daylength barely changes across the year, and that the plant never evolved a strong response to changing days. These plants often flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs some little yield and buys a earlier decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you this with one word, and a grower that reads it as mere geography has missed the point hidden in it.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that decides whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial lines need the autumn days to continue late enough to let the plant to finish; at 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 a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal or low-latitude gardens can finish lines that temperate growers cannot.
The usable rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within southern Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it pushes the date back into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a better summer.