Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a «sativa-dominant» tag read as a description 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 to hand for the concrete examples, since it leans heavily towards the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the words matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, because none of them makes usable without the rest.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular region by local growers and growers alike, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas range widely than in any tent-bred line, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an open field, including height that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers never offer. «Heirloom» in a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for a number of generations, often with a degree of selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but still far from uniform. A shop offering «landrace» without a origin point and a generation history is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Equatorial
Refers to plants out of regions where daylength barely varies across the year, and where the plant does not evolved a strong response to shortening days. Such lines often flower reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, handed around between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys an earlier clearer end. A listing which uses «equatorial» is warning you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on geography has missed the instruction inside it.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to push out new bud clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, irregular buds rather than round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress response, usually from light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze lines, it is built in and is going to occur under a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes a month chasing a fault that is a problem, dropping lights and heat only slowing an already long plant further. The listing seldom warns which kind to expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in a lot of old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as a «sativa» smell: fresh, woody, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off easily by hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the line probably carries real old-sativa genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of hay and nothing of what the pack described.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something metallic that no other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense «Haze» is whatever hybrid that carries some of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says «Haze» without lineage may be mostly percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and via which parent».
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population carries a degree of tendency to it; sativa lines express it more, for one simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can set it off, and an old that has already gone beyond its intended end frequently produces a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a last effort to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa strain weak by nature; it makes the grower’s consistency count for longer. Light-tight tents, stable conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is ready rather than a week later take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is worth worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for any other category.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa grown after an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of the range, because the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely caught out.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and will not be halted after it begins, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is a fact to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming over from indica strains almost always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude
The single number that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants require a autumn days to go on long enough for the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. The further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens are able to ripen lines that temperate gardens never will.
The usable rule for a seed pack: an «outdoor» line harvest month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it pushes the finish back towards the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, not a longer season.