Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, since it runs strongly towards the classic end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, since none of them makes usable without the rest.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also quote the optimistic end of the spread, since the longer end sells less seed.
Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this figure, which is a sensible first step for a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The marketing term and not a botanical one. It usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa by the breeder who drafted the listing, and sometimes signals no more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with the word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy sleepy effect while a good number of indica-labelled lines do the reverse. To a buyer the percentage is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Haze
In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai landraces, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches openly, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid which carries a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” without lineage could be mostly percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering character follows the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high amounts in a lot of classic sativa lines and accounting for much of what growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily through fast drying, and terpinolene fades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the lead terpene, the strain probably has real old-sativa genetics whatever the percentage claims. And where the grower are after that smell to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be cool and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa into a flower that smells of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing
The tendency of some flowers to push out new bud growth on top of existing ones, giving spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually from light too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will happen in a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes weeks chasing a fault that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying a slow plant further. The breeder rarely warns which type you should expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population has some tendency to it; sativa plants show it more often, and the reason is one plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it going, and an old plant has already gone beyond its natural finish often produces a few late male flowers on its own in a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these means a sativa strain weak as a matter of nature; it makes the grower’s consistency matter for longer. A sealed room, stable temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is ready and not two week after take away most of the problem. A listing that states a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more for a long-flowering line than for anything other category.
Latitude
The single number that decides if a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering lines require a autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant ripen; at northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or else watches it rot in November. The closer to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens can ripen plants that northern growers cannot.
The practical rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it moves the finish back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, not a longer summer.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial lines go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the fact worth read before choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by the local growers and growers together, and not by modern selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells spread far more than a tent-bred line, and that variation is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a modern hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an open field, such as height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an equatorial daylength most growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means 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 far from uniform. A shop offering “landrace” without an origin point and a reproduction history is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be priced accordingly.