Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it leans strongly towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since none of them is sense without the rest.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis line carries some tendency to do; sativa plants show it more often, and the reason is a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to trigger it going, and an plant plant has already waited past its natural finish often produces a few late pollen flowers on its own as a last attempt to make seed.
None of this means a sativa line weak as a matter of course; it means the grower’s consistency matter for a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not a week later remove most of the problem. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is saying something more on a long-flowering line than on any else.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from latitudes in which daylength hardly varies through the year, which means where the plant never evolved a strong reaction to shortening days. These lines often start flowering reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed around between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and buys an more decisive end. A listing that uses “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower who reads it as mere origin has missed the point hidden in it.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning lines it is a heat response, typically caused by light too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to occur under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes a month chasing a fault that was never not there, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already long plant even more. The listing seldom says which type you should expect; the parentage generally does.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be halted once it begins, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is a fact to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica strains nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large proportion in many classic sativa lines and responsible for most of what growers describe as a “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, lemon and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, lost quickly by fast drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the name earns two things. When a listing names terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the you are after that profile to survive by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa into a flower that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also quote the optimistic end of a range, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this figure, which is the reasonable first pass if you have a room with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over centuries to one region by the local growers and growers alike, and not by modern selection. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas spread far more than a tent-bred line, and this spread is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a modern product. It carries traits that make sense in an open field, including height that no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for a number of generations, typically with light selection towards indoor life; it is closer to usable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without a origin point and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue category and not a measurable one. It usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, which sometimes signals nothing more than that the flowers are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat couch effect and plenty of indica-labelled stock do the reverse. To a buyer the percentage is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is close to useless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Equatorial plants need the autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant to ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in the end of October or else loses it to mould in November. The further to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and Mediterranean and subtropical growers are able to finish plants that northern growers cannot.
The practical rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of it pushes the finish later towards the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors is shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.