Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the grower standing in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a «sativa-dominant» tag taken as a statement of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it runs heavily to the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, since none of them makes sense without the rest.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term and not a botanical one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, and sometimes signals nothing more than that the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people connect with the word, lively rather than heavy, is driven more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid content than it is by ancestry, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» hybrids produce a flat couch result while plenty of the opposite stock deliver the opposite. To a grower the label is worth something as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and something metallic that no line exactly has.
In its looser sense «Haze» is whatever hybrid which contains some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says «Haze» and gives no parents may be mostly percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, 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 germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of a spread, because the other end sells fewer 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 about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a sensible first pass if you have a room on a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of latitudes in which daylength hardly varies across the year, which means where the plant never develop a strong reaction to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs a little yield and buys a earlier decisive finish. A listing that uses «equatorial» is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere geography has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis population carries some capacity to it; long-flowering plants express it more often, and the reason is one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and an old that has already gone past its intended end often throws a few desperate pollen sacs on its own as a final attempt to set seed.
Not one of this means a sativa strain weak by nature; it means the grower’s consistency matter for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, stable temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready and not two weeks after take away most of the risk. A listing that states the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more on a long-flowering line than on anything other category.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to push out fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving towered, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines 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 cause.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is built in and will occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes a month chasing a fault that was never a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying a long flower even more. The listing seldom says which type to expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large proportion in many old sativa lines and accounting for much of the thing growers mean as the «sativa» aroma: green, woody, lemon and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during the cure than the heavier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the name earns two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the line probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the label says. And where the you wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene sativa into something that tastes of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Latitude
The single number that determines whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering plants need a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in the end of October or else watches it to mould in November. The further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and coastal and low-latitude growers are able to ripen lines that temperate gardens cannot.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an «outdoor» line harvest date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of that pushes the date back into the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a longer season.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over centuries to a particular place by local climate and growers together, rather than by modern selection. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and smells range widely than any tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern product. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, such as a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm set to a daylength most growers cannot provide. «Heirloom» in a listing usually means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor life; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not uniform. A seller offering «landrace» without an origin region and a generation history is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be stopped once it has started, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is a fact to reading ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming from indica strains nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.