Sativa seeds come 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 trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description 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, since it runs strongly to the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, since none of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out new bud clusters on top of old ones, giving towered, open buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat response, usually caused by light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks chasing a problem that is there, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying an already slow plant further. The listing seldom warns which type to expect; the parentage usually does.
Terpinolene
A terpene present in high amounts in many classic sativa lines and accounting for much of what growers mean as a “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, lemon and faintly sweet at once. It is fragile, lost quickly by fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster in storage than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain probably carries real Haze-era genetics regardless of what the label says. And where the you are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be cool and slow; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of hay and nothing of what the pack described.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one place by the local climate and climate alike, and not by modern selection. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas spread far more than in any tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings traits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height that no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, often with a degree of selection for tent conditions; it is closer to usable but still not uniform. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give a collection region and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to plants out of latitudes in which daylength hardly changes across the year, which means where the plant never evolved a sharp response to changing days. These lines frequently start flowering reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The practical response, handed down between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the last weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains a more decisive finish. A listing that uses “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on geography misses the instruction hidden in it.
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 population has a degree of tendency for do; long-flowering plants express it more often, for one plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to trigger it off, and a plant that has already gone beyond its natural finish often throws a few late pollen flowers on its own in a last attempt to set seed.
Not one of these means a sativa strain weak as a matter of course; it means the grower’s discipline count over a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is done and not two weeks later take away most of the problem. A listing that states a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for any other category.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A marketing term and not a measurable one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa by whoever drafted the description, which occasionally signals no more than that the buds are longer or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The effect people associate with a word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene profile and by THC content than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy sleepy result and plenty of indica-labelled lines deliver the opposite. For a buyer the percentage is worth something as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, and the single most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With 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 eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally quote the shorter end of a range, since the longer end moves less seed.
Sativa plants run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a sensible first step if you have a room on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack says is rarely caught out.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering plants need the autumn days to continue late enough for the plant to ripen; in high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean or low-latitude gardens can ripen lines that temperate gardens cannot.
The usable reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of that pushes the date back into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and cannot be stopped after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is the fact to reading ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.