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, something else to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces 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” tag taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, since it leans strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the rest.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue category and not a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the listing, and sometimes means no more than that the flowers are longer or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people connect with a word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene profile and by THC content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy effect while plenty of the opposite lines deliver exactly the opposite. For a buyer the percentage is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is close to worthless without the aroma notes.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is a fact to read ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. Growers coming from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in high amounts in many old sativa lines and accounting for much of what growers describe as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily through hot drying, and it fades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the word earns two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead terpene, the line most likely has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the percentage says. And where the you are after that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Latitude
The one figure that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Long-flowering plants need a run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant to ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in the end of October or loses it rot in November. A further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and coastal and low-latitude gardens are able to finish lines that temperate growers never will.
The usable rule for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of that moves the date back towards the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a better summer.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to grow fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than round ones. In most indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, usually from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will happen in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes a month hunting a fault that was never not a problem, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already long plant further. The breeder seldom warns which type you should expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis population has some tendency to 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 timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it off, and a old that has waited beyond its intended end often produces a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a last effort to set seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa strain weak by course; it makes the room’s discipline matter over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is ready rather than a weeks later take away most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on any else.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes plants out of regions where daylength barely changes through the year, and where the plant does not develop a sharp reaction to changing days. Such plants often start flowering slowly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working response, passed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the final weeks. It costs some yield yield and gains an earlier decisive finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower who reads it as a note on origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and a note sharp that no line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is any cross which carries a share of that family, which by now is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent the old family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering time tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the one most misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, 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 spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is rarely disappointed.
