Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of character, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, since it leans strongly towards the classic end of the category where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch continues two to four weeks and will not be stopped after it begins, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the number worth reading ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica stock almost always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the one most 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 started with a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of the spread, since the longer end sells fewer seed.
Sativa lines run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is the sensible first step if you have a grower with a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular place by the local climate and growers alike, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas spread far more than any tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace like a modern hybrid. It brings traits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over a number of generations, often with light selection towards indoor conditions; it is nearer to usable but nonetheless not uniform. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give a origin point and a reproduction history is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Equatorial plants require the autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A further south, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens are able to finish lines that temperate gardens cannot.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree north of it moves the date later towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden is shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a longer season.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound found in large proportion in many classic sativa lines and accounting for most of what growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, driven off easily through fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during the cure than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the line most likely has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the label says. And when the grower wants that smell to survive by the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene sativa into a flower that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack described.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, typically caused by light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen in a flawless room. A new sativa grower frequently spends a month chasing a fault that was never a problem, lowering lights and heat only delaying an already slow plant even more. The listing rarely warns which kind to expect; the parentage generally does.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis line has a degree of tendency for do; long-flowering lines show it more, and the reason is a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can set it off, and a plant plant has already waited past its natural finish often produces a few late pollen sacs on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
None of this means a sativa strain weak as a matter of course; it means the grower’s discipline matter over a longer stretch. Light-tight room, steady temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is ready rather than a weeks after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for any else.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A marketing term and not a botanical one. The phrase generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, and occasionally means no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people associate with a word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is governed more by terpene profile and the THC content than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a flat sleepy effect while plenty of indica-labelled lines deliver the reverse. To a grower the label is worth something as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Haze
Originally a particular family of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid which carries a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” without lineage may be eighty percent the old family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering character follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.