Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a « sativa-dominant » tag read as a description of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, because it leans strongly to the long-flowering end of the category where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since not one of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is the fact to reading ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains almost always switch far too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene (the « sativa smell »)
A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of classic sativa strains and responsible for most of what growers describe as a « sativa » smell: green, woody, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily through fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly during storage than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the lead terpene, the strain most likely has substantial old-sativa genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the you are after that profile to survive to the jar, the drying is going to be slow and slow; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa to a flower that smells of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Latitude
The single figure that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering lines require a run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. The further to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers are able to ripen plants that temperate growers never will.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an « outdoor » sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of that moves the finish later towards the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over generations to one place by local climate and growers alike, rather than by deliberate selection. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, not a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread widely than a tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished product. It carries traits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to an daylength the majority of growers never provide. « Heirloom » in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for a number of generations, often with a degree of selection towards indoor life; it is closer to usable but still far from a hybrid. A seller offering « landrace » that does not give an collection point and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Equatorial
Refers to lines from regions where daylength barely varies through the year, which means that the plant does not develop a strong reaction to changing days. These lines often flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed around between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs some little yield and gains an more decisive end. A listing that uses « equatorial » is warning you this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction inside it.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something sharp that no other other line exactly has.
In its looser sense « Haze » is whatever hybrid that carries some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads « Haze » and gives no parents may be eighty percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not « is it a Haze » but « how much, and through which parent ».
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to grow new bud growth on top of old ones, producing spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a heat response, typically caused by light too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and will happen in a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently spends weeks chasing a problem that was never a problem, dropping lights and heat only delaying an already slow plant further. The breeder seldom says which type you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis line carries a degree of capacity to it; long-flowering lines express it more, for a plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to trigger it going, and a plant that has already gone beyond its natural finish frequently throws a few desperate male sacs on its own in a final effort to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa line weak as a matter of nature; it means the room’s discipline count for longer. Light-tight tents, stable conditions and cutting when the plant is ready and not two weeks later remove the greater part of the risk. A listing which states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more for a long-flowering line than on any other category.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, and the single most misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a « fourteen-week » sativa started with an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of the spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa lines run anywhere 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 that number, which is a sensible first pass for a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack says is seldom caught out.