Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and a third to the grower standing in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a «sativa-dominant» label read 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 the concrete examples, since it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since none of them makes usable without the rest.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A aromatic compound present in large amounts in a lot of old sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing growers mean as a «sativa» smell: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and it degrades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning stock.
To a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the line most likely carries substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the label claims. And when the you are after that smell to still be there to the jar, the drying has to be cool and slow; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene sativa into something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the one most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa started with an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also quote the optimistic end of the range, because the longer end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the sensible first step for a room on a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis population carries some tendency to it; sativa lines express it more often, for a simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to set it off, and a plant plant has waited beyond its intended end often produces a few late pollen flowers on its own in a final effort to set seed.
None of these makes a sativa line weak by nature; it makes the grower’s discipline count over longer. A sealed tents, stable temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready rather than a week after take away the greater part of the risk. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex traits is saying something worth hearing for a sativa than for any else.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue term rather than a botanical one. It usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by whoever wrote the description, and occasionally means nothing more than a certain the flowers are longer or the smell brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of «sativa-dominant» releases produce a flat sleepy result while a good number of indica-labelled stock do the reverse. For a grower the label is useful for a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace lines go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is a number worth reading ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains almost always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to grow fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is genetic and will happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a fault that is not there, lowering lights and heat and delaying an already long flower further. The listing rarely says which kind to expect; the lineage usually does.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines if a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require the run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. A further south, in the northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and Mediterranean and subtropical gardens can ripen lines that temperate growers never will.
The practical rule for a seed pack: an «outdoor» line finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step north of that pushes the finish back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.
Haze
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and Thai parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line quite has.
In its second sense «Haze» is whatever hybrid which carries a share of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads «Haze» without parents could be mostly percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the share, not the name. The working question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over generations to a particular place by the local climate and climate alike, rather than by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Congolese and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a modern product. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. «Heirloom» in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for some generations, typically with a degree of selection for tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop offering «landrace» that does not give a collection point and a generation count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
