Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, because it leans strongly to the classic end of the category and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no particular order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the others.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, and the one most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally give the shorter end of a range, since the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is a sensible first pass if you have a room with a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack states is rarely caught out.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to one place by the local climate and climate together, rather than by modern selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and smells spread widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a finished product. It brings traits that make sense in an equatorial field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for a number of generations, often with light selection towards indoor conditions; it is nearer to usable but still not a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without an collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the number to reading ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers coming from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A catalogue term rather than a measurable one. It usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to whoever drafted 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 effect people connect with a word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and by THC content than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy couch effect while plenty of the opposite stock do the opposite. For a grower the label is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to grow new calyx growth on top of existing ones, giving towered, irregular buds instead of round ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress response, usually from light too close or a room too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to occur in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a fault that is not there, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying an already long flower even more. The listing seldom says which kind you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note sharp that no line quite reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering character follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity for do; sativa plants express it more often, for a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to trigger it off, and a old that has already waited past its natural finish often throws a few desperate male flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
None of these means a sativa line unstable by course; it means the grower’s discipline count for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is done rather than a weeks after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something more on a sativa than on anything else.
Latitude
The single number that decides if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Equatorial lines need a 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 else watches it to mould in November. A closer to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and coastal or subtropical growers are able to finish plants that northern growers never will.
The usable reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree further north of that pushes the date back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or a covered space, not a better summer.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to lines from regions where daylength barely varies through the year, which means where the plant never develop a sharp reaction to changing days. Such plants frequently flower slowly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day and not a signal.
The working response, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys an more decisive finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower who reads it as a note on origin misses the point inside it.