Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it leans heavily to the long-flowering end of the category where the words matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because none of them makes usable on its own without the others.
Latitude
The one figure that determines if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; at high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens are able to finish lines that temperate growers cannot.
The usable reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree north of it pushes the finish back towards the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors is looking for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for much of what people describe as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost quickly through hot drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the line probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the label claims. And where the you are after that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line to something that tastes of hay and no trace of what the pack described.
Equatorial
Describes lines from latitudes where daylength barely changes through the year, and that the plant does not develop a strong reaction to changing days. These plants frequently flower slowly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working response, passed down between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and gains an more decisive end. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower who takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the single most frequently misunderstood number 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 grown after an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a range, because the other end moves fewer seed.
Sativa plants take 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 that figure, which is the sensible first step if you have a room with a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to push out fresh calyx clusters on top of existing ones, giving spired, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a heat symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and is going to happen in a flawless room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a problem that was never a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying an already long plant even more. The listing seldom warns which kind you should expect; the lineage usually does.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category rather than a measurable one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, and sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with the word, lively rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and by cannabinoid balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat couch effect while plenty of the opposite lines deliver the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to one place by local growers and growers together, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells spread far more than a tent-bred line, and that spread is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as height that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, often with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is nearer to usable but still not uniform. A seller offering “landrace” without an origin point and a generation history is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population has a degree of capacity for it; long-flowering plants show it more often, and the reason is one simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering to set it off, and a plant that has already waited past its natural end frequently throws a few late male flowers on its own in a final attempt to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the room’s discipline matter over longer. A sealed room, stable conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is done and not a week after remove most of the problem. A listing which states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing on a sativa than on anything else.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then kept and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches openly, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and a note metallic that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is any cross which contains a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be eighty percent the old family or one sixteenth of it, and the flowering character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.