A Short Glossary for Sativa Seed Buyers

Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower standing 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 taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it leans strongly to the classic end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, because none of them makes usable on its own without the others.

Equatorial

Refers to lines out of regions in which daylength hardly changes through the year, which means that the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. Such plants frequently start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.

The working response, passed around between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the last weeks. It costs a little yield and gains an earlier clearer end. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you this with one word, and a grower who reads it as mere geography has missed the instruction hidden in it.

Latitude

The one number that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering lines need a run of shortening days to go on long enough for the plant finish; at northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. A further south, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens are able to finish plants that temperate gardens never will.

The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere in southern Europe or the western United States, and each degree further north of that moves the finish back towards the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa outdoors is shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a better summer.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis line carries some capacity to it; sativa plants show it more, for a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to set it off, and a plant plant has waited beyond its intended end frequently produces a few desperate male sacs on its own as a last effort to make seed.

Not one of this means a sativa strain unstable by course; it makes the grower’s consistency count over longer. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is done and not a week after remove most of the problem. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more on a sativa than for anything else.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants adapted through centuries to a particular region by the local growers and climate alike, and not by deliberate selection. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas range far more than in a tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of growing one.

The trap is treating a landrace like a finished product. It brings traits that make sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give a collection point and a generation count is using the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.

Foxtailing

The tendency of certain flowers to grow new calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, typically from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.

In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a problem that is not a problem, dropping lights and temperatures and delaying an already long plant even more. The breeder seldom says which type you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.

Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)

A terpene present in large proportion in a lot of classic sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing growers mean as a “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off quickly by fast drying, and it fades more quickly during storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.

For a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead terpene, the line probably carries real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the label claims. And where the grower wants that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying has to be cool and cool; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene line into something that tastes of hay and no trace of what the pack promised.

Flowering time (and what it is counted from)

The number of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the single most frequently 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 grown with a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders additionally give the optimistic end of the spread, since the longer end sells fewer seed.

Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the reasonable first pass if you have a room with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.

Stretch (the doubling)

The burst of upward growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and will not be stopped once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.

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

Sativa-dominant

The marketing category and not a measurable one. It usually means that more of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa according to the breeder who drafted the description, and occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other lines.

The experience people connect with a word, lively instead of heavy, is governed far more by terpene profile and by THC balance than it is by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat couch result and a good number of indica-labelled stock deliver the opposite. For a grower the percentage is worth something for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to worthless without the terpene notes.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

Originally a particular line of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no other line quite has.

In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid which carries a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering time tracks the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.