Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the person standing in front of the listing. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a statement of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, because it leans strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, since none of them is sense on its own without the others.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat response, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a problem that is not a problem, dropping lights and temperatures and slowing an already slow flower further. The breeder seldom says which kind to expect; the lineage usually does.
Equatorial
Describes plants from latitudes where daylength hardly changes across the year, and where the plant never evolved a sharp response to shortening days. Such plants often flower reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical fix, handed around between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the final weeks. It loses some little yield and buys a earlier clearer end. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on origin misses the point inside it.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the one most misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally quote the optimistic end of the spread, since the longer end moves fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a sensible first pass if you have a room on a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Sativa-dominant
The marketing category rather than a botanical one. It usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, and sometimes signals no more than that the flowers are airier or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other lines.
The effect people associate with a word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by THC content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat couch effect and a good number of indica-labelled lines deliver exactly the reverse. To a buyer the percentage is useful as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is close to worthless without the terpene description.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and cannot be stopped after it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is the fact worth reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched 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. Growers coming over from indica stock nearly always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity to it; long-flowering lines express it more, for one simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can trigger it off, and a plant plant has already waited beyond its intended end often produces a few late pollen flowers on its own as a last attempt to make seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa line unstable by nature; it makes the room’s discipline count for longer. Light-tight room, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done rather than two weeks later take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which states the breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is saying something more for a sativa than for any other category.
Latitude
The single figure that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require a run of shortening days to go on long enough for the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. A closer to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and Mediterranean or low-latitude growers are able to finish lines that temperate gardens never will.
The usable reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of that moves the finish back towards the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, not a better summer.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high proportion in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for much of the thing people describe as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, woody, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by hot drying, and it degrades more quickly in the cure than the heavier terpenes which lead indica-leaning lines.
To a seed buyer the word does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the lead terpene, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that profile to still be there to the jar, the drying has to be slow and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack described.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a particular family of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian landraces, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and something sharp that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid which contains a share of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage could be eighty percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.