Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a statement of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, since it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, because none of them makes sense without the others.
Equatorial
Refers to lines from regions in which daylength hardly changes through the year, which means that the plant never develop a sharp response to changing days. Such lines frequently flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed down among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs a little yield and gains an more clearer end. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the point inside it.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some capacity for do; sativa plants show it more, and the reason is one simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and a plant that has already gone beyond its intended end frequently produces a few desperate male sacs on its own in a final attempt to make seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa line weak as a matter of course; it means the grower’s consistency matter for longer. A sealed tents, steady conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is done rather than two week later take away most of the problem. A listing which states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for any other category.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to push out fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a heat symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In many sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends weeks hunting a problem that was never there, lowering lights and heat and delaying an already long flower even more. The listing seldom says which type to expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a range, because the longer end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower with a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted through generations to one region by the local growers and growers alike, and not by modern breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican lines are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread far more than a tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a finished hybrid. It brings traits that make sense in an open field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for a number of generations, often with light selection for tent conditions; it is closer to usable but still far from a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an collection region and a reproduction count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be priced with that in mind.
Haze
Originally a specific line of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and something metallic that no other line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid which carries some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” without parents could be eighty percent the old family or one small fraction 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”.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be stopped once it has started, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is a number to read ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound found in high amounts in many old sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing people describe as a “sativa” aroma: green, woody, citrus and faintly sweet at once. It is fragile, driven off easily by hot drying, and it degrades faster in the cure than the heavier terpenes which lead most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the name does two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the label says. And where the you wants that profile to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be cool and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene line into something that smells of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue category rather than a botanical one. It generally means that more of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, which sometimes means no more than a certain the buds are airier or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid content than by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat couch effect and plenty of indica-labelled lines deliver the opposite. To a grower the label is worth something as 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.