Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the person standing in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces 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 statement of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it leans heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, because none of them is usable without the others.
Equatorial
Describes lines from regions where daylength hardly changes through the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. These plants frequently flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The working response, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the final weeks. It loses a little yield and gains a more clearer end. A listing which says «equatorial» is telling you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography misses the instruction hidden in it.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis line carries a degree of tendency to do; sativa lines express it more, for a simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and an old that has gone past its natural end often produces a few desperate male flowers on its own in a last effort to set seed.
None of these makes a sativa strain unstable as a matter of course; it means the grower’s discipline matter over longer. A sealed tents, steady conditions and cutting the moment the plant is done and not a weeks later take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more on a long-flowering line than on any else.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai landraces, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense «Haze» is any hybrid which carries a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says «Haze» and gives no parents may be mostly percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and through which parent».
Stretch
The surge of upward growth which comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be halted once it has started, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is the fact to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica strains nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high amounts in many old sativa lines and accounting for most of what people describe as a «sativa» aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral all at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly in the cure than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line probably carries real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And when the grower are after that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by local climate and climate together, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas spread far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a finished product. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, such as height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers never offer. «Heirloom» on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop offering «landrace» that does not give an collection point and a reproduction count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one that no pack states. Long-flowering lines require the run of shortening days to go on long enough for the plant finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it rot in November. A closer south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and coastal and low-latitude growers can finish lines that temperate gardens never will.
The usable reading for a seed pack: an «outdoor» line harvest date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree further north of that moves the date back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden is looking for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a better summer.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misread number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa grown with a ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally quote the shorter end of the spread, because the other end sells fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a room with a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to grow new bud growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress response, typically from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to occur in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month chasing a problem that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only slowing an already slow flower even more. The breeder rarely says which type you should expect; the lineage usually does.