Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a «sativa-dominant» tag taken as a statement of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, because it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the category where the vocabulary matter most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no particular order, since none of them makes sense on its own without the rest.

Sativa-dominant

The catalogue term rather than a botanical one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa by the breeder who drafted the listing, which sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are longer or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The effect people associate with a word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the THC content than it is by ancestry, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» releases produce a flat couch effect while a good number of the opposite stock do exactly the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is next to worthless without the aroma notes.

Stretch

The surge of vertical growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be halted after it has started, only redirected by training.

In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is a number to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica stock nearly always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.

Landrace

A population of plants adapted over generations to one region by local climate and climate together, rather than by deliberate selection. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas spread widely than in any tent-bred line, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.

The mistake is buying a landrace as a modern hybrid. It brings habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. «Heirloom» in a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for a number of generations, often with a degree of selection towards indoor life; it is nearer to usable but still far from a hybrid. A seller listing «landrace» without an collection point and a reproduction history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced with that in mind.

Flowering time

The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With 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 five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of the range, because the other end sells fewer seed.

Long-flowering lines run anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is the sensible first pass for a grower on a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.

Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)

Refers to lines from regions where daylength barely varies across the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to changing days. Such lines frequently flower reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day and not a signal.

The practical fix, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and buys a more clearer end. A listing which says «equatorial» is warning you about this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on origin has missed the instruction inside it.

Foxtailing

The tendency of some flowers to grow fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, typically from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.

In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks hunting a fault that was never there, dropping lights and heat only delaying an already long plant even more. The breeder rarely says which type to expect; the lineage generally does.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

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 a degree of tendency to it; sativa lines show it more often, for a plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to trigger it off, and an plant that has already waited beyond its natural end often produces a few desperate pollen flowers on its own in a final attempt to set seed.

None of these makes a sativa strain unstable by course; it means the room’s consistency count over longer. A sealed tents, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is ready and not a weeks later remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that states a breeder screens parents for intersex traits is worth worth hearing on a long-flowering line than on any else.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The one figure that determines if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Long-flowering plants need the autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant ripen; in northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it rot in November. A closer south, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and coastal and subtropical gardens are able to ripen plants that temperate gardens cannot.

The usable reading of a seed pack: an «outdoor» line finishing date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within southern Europe or the western United States, and every degree north of it pushes the date later into the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or a covered space, not a longer season.

Haze

Originally a specific line of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai landraces, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no line quite has.

In its second sense «Haze» is whatever hybrid which carries a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads «Haze» without lineage may be mostly percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is not «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».

Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)

A aromatic compound found in high proportion in a lot of classic sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing growers describe as a «sativa» smell: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily by hot drying, and terpinolene fades faster in storage than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.

To a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the line most likely carries substantial old-sativa ancestry whatever the percentage says. And when the grower wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that smells of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.