Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind 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 standing in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of character, a landrace bought as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them makes usable without the others.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue term rather than a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the description, and sometimes means nothing more than a certain the flowers are longer or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene profile and by THC content than by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat couch result while plenty of the opposite stock do the opposite. For a grower the percentage is worth something as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Haze
In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note sharp that no other line exactly has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage may be mostly percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Almost every cannabis line has some tendency to do; long-flowering plants show it more often, for one plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can set it off, and a plant that has waited beyond its intended finish frequently throws a few late pollen flowers on its own as a final attempt to make seed.
None of these means a sativa strain unstable by course; it means the grower’s consistency matter for longer. A sealed tents, steady conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is ready and not a week after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth worth hearing on a sativa than for anything other category.
Latitude
The one figure that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial plants need a autumn days to continue long enough for the plant ripen; at northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. The further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and coastal or subtropical growers can ripen lines that temperate gardens never will.
The usable reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere in temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it pushes the finish back into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, not a better summer.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is a number worth reading before choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in high amounts in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for most of the thing people mean as a “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, lemon and faintly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost easily through fast drying, and it degrades faster in storage than the earthier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning lines.
To a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the line probably carries substantial old-sativa genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the grower wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the drying has to be slow and slow; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of hay and no trace of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to grow new bud growth on top of existing ones, giving towered, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually from light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to occur under a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently spends weeks hunting a fault that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying a slow plant further. The breeder rarely says which kind you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes plants out of latitudes where daylength barely changes across the year, which means that the plant never develop a sharp response to shortening days. Such lines frequently flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical response, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs a yield yield and buys an more clearer end. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on origin misses the point inside it.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the optimistic end of a spread, since the other end sells less seed.
Long-flowering lines run anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a sensible first pass if you have a room with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom disappointed.
