Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the person trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it runs strongly to the classic end of the category where the words matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because none of them makes sense without the rest.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis line has a degree of tendency for do; long-flowering lines show it more, and the reason is a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can set it off, and a old that has waited beyond its intended end frequently throws a few late male sacs on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa line weak by course; it means the room’s discipline matter for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is ready rather than a week later take away most of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex traits is saying something more for a long-flowering line than on anything other category.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something metallic that no line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” and gives no lineage may be mostly percent the old family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering character follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and will not be stopped after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is a fact worth reading ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming over from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Equatorial
Refers to plants out of regions in which daylength barely changes across the year, which means where the plant never develop a sharp reaction to shortening days. Such lines often start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the final weeks. It costs a little yield and buys a more clearer end. A listing that uses “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that reads it as mere origin misses the point hidden in it.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the one most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of the range, since the other end sells less seed.
Sativa plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a sensible first pass for a room on a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over centuries to one region by the local growers and growers alike, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells range widely than in a tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished product. It brings habits that made sense in an open field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. “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 tent conditions; it is nearer to manageable but still not a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without a collection region and a reproduction history is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Equatorial lines require the autumn days to continue late enough to let the plant to ripen; in northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in the end of October or else watches it rot in November. The closer south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and coastal and low-latitude gardens can ripen plants that northern gardens cannot.
The practical reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree further north of it pushes the date later into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a longer season.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for much of the thing people describe as the “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, driven off easily by hot drying, and it degrades more quickly during storage than the heavier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the lead terpene, the line probably has real Haze-era genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the grower wants that profile to survive to the jar, the drying has to be slow and cool; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term rather than a botanical one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, and sometimes signals nothing more than that the buds are longer or the smell brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people connect with the word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy sleepy result while plenty of the opposite lines do exactly the opposite. For a buyer the percentage is worth something for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to grow fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a stress response, typically from light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends a month chasing a problem that was never there, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already long flower even more. The breeder seldom says which kind you should expect; the parentage usually does.