Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, since it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, since not one of them makes sense without the others.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis population has a degree of tendency to do; long-flowering plants express it more often, for a simple one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and an old plant has already waited past its intended end frequently produces a few late pollen flowers on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
Not one of this means a sativa strain weak by nature; it makes the room’s discipline count for a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready rather than two week after remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that states a breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something more for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing term rather than a botanical one. It usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa by the breeder who drafted the description, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the buds are airier or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a flat sleepy effect and plenty of indica-labelled lines do exactly the opposite. To a grower the percentage is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to useless without the terpene description.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to grow fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, usually caused by light too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur in a flawless room. A new sativa grower often wastes weeks chasing a fault that is there, lowering lights and heat only delaying a long flower further. The listing seldom warns which type to expect; the parentage generally does.
Equatorial
Describes lines out of latitudes where daylength barely varies through the year, and that the plant does not evolved a strong reaction to changing days. These lines frequently start flowering slowly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The practical response, handed down among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It costs some little yield and buys an more clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on geography misses the point hidden in it.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that determines whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Long-flowering lines need the run of shortening days to go on long enough for the plant ripen; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in the end of October or else loses it rot in November. A closer south, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and coastal and subtropical gardens can finish lines that northern gardens cannot.
The practical reading of a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree north of it moves the date later into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa outdoors is shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better summer.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial types triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it begins, merely redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is a number to read ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica strains nearly always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the single most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies also quote the optimistic end of the range, since the longer end sells less seed.
Sativa plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a room with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high amounts in many classic sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing people describe as the “sativa” smell: green, woody, lemon and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the lead terpene, the line most likely carries substantial old-sativa genetics whatever the percentage claims. And when the you wants that smell to survive to the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line to something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over centuries to one place by the local growers and growers alike, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range far more than in a tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is treating a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over a number of generations, often with light selection for indoor conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A shop offering “landrace” without an collection point and a reproduction history is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.