Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and a third to the person standing 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 taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description 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 to hand as reference, because it leans heavily to the classic end of the spectrum where the words matter most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no particular order, since none of them makes sense on its own without the others.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and Thai landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no other line exactly has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries some of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage could be eighty percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering character tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over generations to one place by local growers and growers together, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas spread widely than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings traits that make sense in an open field, such as height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for some generations, typically with a degree of selection for tent conditions; it is closer to usable but nonetheless far from uniform. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an collection region and a reproduction history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most frequently misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a range, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa lines take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is the reasonable first step for a grower with a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue category and not a botanical one. The phrase generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage were described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, which sometimes means no more than a certain the flowers are longer or the smell brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people connect with a word, lively instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy couch effect and a good number of the opposite stock do exactly the reverse. For a buyer the label is worth something as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large amounts in many old sativa lines and responsible for much of what people describe as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily by hot drying, and it degrades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the name earns two things. When a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the strain most likely has real Haze-era genetics whatever the label says. And when the you wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to grow new bud growth on top of existing ones, giving towered, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually from light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is built in and will occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends weeks hunting a problem that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and slowing a slow plant further. The breeder seldom warns which type you should expect; the parentage usually does.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some tendency for do; sativa lines show it more often, for one plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and an old plant has gone beyond its intended end frequently produces a few desperate pollen sacs on its own in a last attempt to make seed.
None of these means a sativa line weak by nature; it means the room’s consistency matter over longer. A sealed room, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not a week later take away most of the risk. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing on a sativa than for anything other category.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial lines go further. The stretch continues two to four weeks and will not be stopped after it begins, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the number worth reading before choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica strains almost always flip too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial lines require a run of shortening days to continue late enough to let the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it rot in November. The further to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal and subtropical gardens can ripen plants that northern growers never will.
The usable rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within southern Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of that pushes the date later towards the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a better summer.