Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the grower standing in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of character, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, since it leans heavily towards the classic end of the spectrum where the vocabulary matter most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since not one of them is sense on its own without the others.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound found in high amounts in many classic sativa strains and accounting for much of what people describe as the “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes which lead indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the line most likely has substantial old-sativa ancestry whatever the label claims. And where the you wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of very little and no trace of what the pack described.
Haze
Originally a specific line of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and something metallic that no other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any cross which contains some of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage could be mostly percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the single most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also quote the shorter end of a range, because the other end moves fewer seed.
Sativa plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a sensible first pass if you have a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to grow new calyx clusters on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month hunting a problem that is a problem, dropping lights and heat and delaying an already long plant even more. The breeder rarely warns which kind you should expect; the lineage usually does.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A marketing category rather than a botanical one. The phrase usually means that more of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa by the breeder who wrote the description, and occasionally means no more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people connect with a word, lively instead of heavy, is governed more by terpene chemistry and the THC balance than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a flat sleepy result while a good number of the opposite stock deliver the opposite. To a grower the percentage is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of regions where daylength barely changes across the year, which means where the plant never evolved a strong reaction to shortening days. Such lines frequently start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working response, handed down between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the final weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains an more clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Latitude
The single figure that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Long-flowering lines require the autumn days to continue long enough to let the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. A closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and coastal and subtropical gardens are able to ripen lines that temperate growers never will.
The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere in southern Europe or the western United States, and every step north of it moves the finish back into the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a longer season.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace types triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the fact to reading ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People coming over from indica strains almost always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population has some tendency to it; sativa plants express it more often, for one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it off, and an old plant has already gone past its intended end frequently throws a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it makes the room’s discipline count for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is ready rather than two weeks after take away most of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is saying something more for a sativa than for any other category.