Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other kind 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 trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of character, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it leans heavily towards the classic end of the category and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, because none of them makes sense without the rest.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to push out fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, giving towered, open buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, typically from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and will happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month chasing a problem that was never not a problem, dropping lights and temperatures and slowing a slow flower even more. The listing rarely says which kind to expect; the lineage generally does.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis line has some tendency for do; sativa lines express it more often, and the reason is a plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to set it off, and a old that has waited beyond its intended end often produces a few late pollen flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
None of this makes a sativa line unstable by course; it means the room’s consistency count over a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable conditions and cutting when the plant is done rather than a weeks after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something more on a sativa than on anything else.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a particular line of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, pine and something metallic that no other other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid which contains a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” without lineage may be mostly percent original classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow time tracks the share, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Latitude
The one number that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Equatorial lines require the run of shortening days to go on late enough to let the plant to ripen; in northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and coastal and subtropical gardens can finish lines that northern growers cannot.
The usable rule for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere in southern Europe or the western United States, and each step north of it moves the finish later towards the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa in the garden is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category rather than a botanical one. The phrase generally means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, which occasionally signals no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people connect with the word, clear-headed rather than sedating, is governed more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy sleepy effect while a good number of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the reverse. For a grower the percentage is worth something as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to effect it is close to useless without the terpene notes.
Flowering time
The number of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, and the one most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally quote the optimistic end of the spread, since the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa plants run anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is a sensible first step for a room on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely caught out.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to lines out of regions where daylength hardly changes through the year, and where the plant never evolved a sharp reaction to changing days. These plants often flower reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, passed down between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the last weeks. It costs a yield yield and gains a more decisive finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower who reads it as a note on origin misses the point inside it.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of old sativa strains and responsible for most of what people mean as the “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily by fast drying, and it fades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. When a listing names terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain probably carries real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And where the you are after that profile to still be there to the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene line to a flower that smells of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial types triple. The stretch continues three to five weeks and will not be stopped once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is a number to reading ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
