Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it means one 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 disappointing sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of character, a landrace bought as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it leans heavily to the long-flowering end of the category where the words matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, because not one of them makes usable on its own without the others.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing term and not a botanical one. The phrase usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage were described as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, and sometimes signals no more than that the flowers are longer or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy sleepy result while plenty of the opposite lines do exactly the opposite. To a buyer the percentage is worth something as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population carries some tendency for do; sativa lines show it more, for a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it off, and an old that has gone past its intended finish frequently produces a few late pollen sacs on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line weak by nature; it makes the room’s consistency matter for longer. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready and not a weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more on a sativa than on any else.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth that follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be halted after it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is the number to reading before deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with a ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally quote the optimistic end of the range, since the other end sells less seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere 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 the reasonable first pass for a room with a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to one region by the local climate and growers together, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range widely than a tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a modern product. It brings habits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm set to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over a number of generations, often with light selection for tent life; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an collection point and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound found in large amounts in a lot of old sativa lines and responsible for much of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and it fades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the word does two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain probably has real Haze-era genetics whatever the label claims. 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 turns a terpinolene line to a flower that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Equatorial plants require the autumn days to continue long enough to let the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it rot in November. The further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal or subtropical gardens are able to finish plants that northern growers cannot.
The usable reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree north of it moves the date back into the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa outdoors needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, and not a better summer.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to push out fresh bud clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, usually from light too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Thai and some Haze lines, it is built in and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a fault that was never not there, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying an already long plant further. The breeder seldom warns which type to expect; the parentage usually tells you.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a specific line of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian landraces, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, pine and something metallic that no other other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid that contains some of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no parents may be eighty percent the classic family or a sixteenth 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 through which parent”.