A Working Glossary for Sativa Seed Buyers
Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, since it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the category where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them makes sense on its own without the rest.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is a fact to reading before deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica strains almost always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a specific line of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and a note sharp that no other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is any cross which carries some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” and gives no parents could be eighty percent the old family or one sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over generations to a particular region by the local growers and climate alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread far more than in a tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a modern hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not uniform. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give an collection point and a generation history is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis line carries a degree of tendency to do; sativa plants express it more, for a simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can trigger it off, and an old that has gone past its natural end often throws a few desperate male sacs on its own as a final attempt to make seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa strain weak as a matter of nature; it makes the grower’s consistency count over longer. Light-tight tents, steady conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready and not a weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that decides whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Equatorial lines need a run of shortening days to continue late enough to let the plant to finish; at high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A further south, within a northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and coastal or low-latitude growers are able to finish lines that temperate growers cannot.
The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step further north of that pushes the date later into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden is shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better summer.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing term rather than a botanical one. It usually means that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa by the breeder who wrote the description, and occasionally means no more than that the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s other lines.
The experience people connect with a word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and by THC balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat couch effect and a good number of the opposite stock deliver exactly the reverse. For a grower the label is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from regions in which daylength hardly changes through the year, and that the plant does not develop a strong response to changing days. Such plants often flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working fix, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the final weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains a earlier decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on geography has missed the instruction inside it.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, which is the one 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 started with an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the optimistic end of the range, because the other end sells less seed.
Long-flowering plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this figure, which is the reasonable first pass for a room with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to grow fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a heat symptom, typically caused by light too close or a room that is too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze lines, it is built in and is going to happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month chasing a problem that was never not there, lowering lights and heat and delaying an already long plant even more. The listing seldom says which type to expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in large proportion in many old sativa strains and responsible for much of the thing people describe as a “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and faintly sweet at once. It is volatile, driven off easily through hot drying, and it fades faster in the cure than the heavier terpenes that lead indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the strain most likely has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the label claims. And where the you wants that smell to survive by the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa into something that tastes of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.