A Short Glossary for Sativa Seed Buyers

Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the person standing in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes 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 read as a description of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it runs heavily towards the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since not one of them makes usable without the rest.

Flowering time

The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most misread figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa started with a eight-week vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of a range, because the longer end moves less seed.

Sativa plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the reasonable first step if you have a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The single number that decides if a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require a run of shortening days to continue long enough for the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in the end of October or else watches it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal and low-latitude growers are able to ripen lines that temperate gardens cannot.

The usable rule of a seed pack: an «outdoor» sativa finishing date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree north of that pushes the finish later into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa outdoors is looking for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a better summer.

Landrace

A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by the local climate and climate alike, and not by modern selection. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range widely than any tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of keeping one.

The trap is buying a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to an equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. «Heirloom» in a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over some generations, often with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but still far from uniform. A shop listing «landrace» without a collection point and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.

Equatorial

Describes plants out of latitudes in which daylength barely changes across the year, and where the plant does not develop a strong reaction to changing days. Such plants frequently flower reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.

The practical fix, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the final weeks. It loses some little yield and gains a more clearer finish. A listing which says «equatorial» is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the instruction inside it.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note metallic that no other other line quite reproduces.

In its looser sense «Haze» is whatever cross that carries a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says «Haze» and gives no parents may be mostly percent original classic family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering time tracks the share, not the name. The working question is not «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population has a degree of capacity to do; sativa lines show it more, for a plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to trigger it off, and an old plant has waited past its intended end often throws a few desperate pollen flowers on its own in a last attempt to set seed.

None of this makes a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it means the grower’s consistency count for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is ready and not a week later remove most of the problem. A listing which states the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more on a sativa than on anything else.

Sativa-dominant

The catalogue category rather than a botanical one. It generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the buds are longer or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The experience people connect with a word, lively rather than heavy, is driven more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» hybrids produce a heavy sleepy effect while a good number of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the opposite. For a grower the percentage is worth something as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the aroma description.

Stretch (the doubling)

The surge of vertical growth that follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and will not be halted once it begins, merely redirected by training.

In tent terms, a stretch figure is a number worth reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.

Foxtailing

The habit of some flowers to grow fresh calyx clusters on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning lines it is a heat response, usually caused by light too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to fix the room.

In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends a month hunting a fault that was never there, dropping lights and heat only slowing an already slow flower further. The listing seldom warns which type to expect; the lineage usually does.

Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)

A terpene present in high amounts in a lot of classic sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as the «sativa» smell: fresh, piney, lemon and slightly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly in the cure than the heavier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.

To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain most likely carries real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the label says. And when the grower wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying has to be slow and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack described.