Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of character, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, since none of them is usable without the others.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular place by local climate and climate together, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, often with a degree of selection for tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless far from a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without an collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial lines go further. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and will not be stopped once it begins, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the fact to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. Growers coming from indica strains nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of a range, because the longer end sells fewer seed.
Sativa lines run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a sensible first step if you have a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is rarely caught out.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis line carries a degree of capacity for it; long-flowering plants show it more, and the reason is a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can trigger it off, and a plant plant has already gone past its intended finish frequently produces a few desperate pollen sacs on its own as a final effort to set seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it means the room’s discipline matter for a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable conditions and cutting the moment the plant is done rather than a weeks after remove most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something worth hearing on a sativa than for any other category.
Latitude
The one number that determines whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Equatorial lines require the run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant finish; at northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or else watches it rot in November. A further south, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers can finish lines that northern growers never will.
The practical rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every degree further north of it moves the date later towards the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a better summer.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of latitudes where daylength hardly varies across the year, which means that the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. These plants frequently flower reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, passed around between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It costs some little yield and buys a more decisive finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on geography has missed the instruction inside it.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A catalogue category and not a measurable one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by whoever drafted the description, and occasionally means nothing more than a certain the flowers are longer or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s other releases.
The effect people associate with a word, lively instead of heavy, is driven more by terpene profile and by THC balance than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy couch effect while plenty of the opposite lines deliver the reverse. For a buyer the percentage is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to push out new calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually caused by light too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a fault that was never there, dropping lights and temperatures and slowing a long plant further. The listing rarely warns which kind you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large amounts in many old sativa lines and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost quickly through hot drying, and it fades more quickly during storage than the heavier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading terpene, the strain most likely has substantial old-sativa genetics whatever the percentage says. And when the you wants that profile to survive to the jar, the drying has to be cool and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene sativa into a flower that tastes of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.