Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal 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 pack. The failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it runs heavily towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the words matter most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, since not one of them is sense without the rest.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line has a degree of capacity for it; long-flowering plants show it more, for one plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and an plant that has gone beyond its natural finish often produces a few late male flowers on its own in a final attempt to set seed.
None of these means a sativa strain unstable by course; it means the grower’s consistency count for a longer stretch. A sealed tents, steady conditions and cutting when the plant is done rather than two week later take away most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is worth worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for any else.
Latitude
The single number that determines whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants need a autumn days to go on late enough for the plant to ripen; in northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A closer south, within a northern hemisphere, the later the window runs, and coastal or low-latitude gardens can ripen plants that northern gardens cannot.
The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of that moves the date later towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors is shopping for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, and not a longer season.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off easily by hot drying, and it fades more quickly during storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing names terpinolene as the leading aromas, the line probably has real old-sativa genetics whatever the label claims. And where the you are after that profile to survive to the jar, the drying has to be cool and cool; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line to something that smells of hay and no trace of what the pack described.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of some flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and will happen in a flawless room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a fault that was never a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying an already long plant further. The breeder seldom warns which kind you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of latitudes where daylength barely varies through the year, and where the plant does not develop a sharp response to shortening days. These lines often flower reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The practical response, handed down among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the final weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains an more decisive end. A listing that uses “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography has missed the point inside it.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular place by the local climate and growers together, and not by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range widely than a tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but still far from a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” without an origin region and a generation history is using the word loosely, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth which follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is a fact worth reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica strains nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, and the single most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of the spread, since the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is the reasonable first pass for a room on a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue category and not a botanical one. The phrase usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage were described as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, and sometimes means nothing more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.
The experience people associate with a word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and the THC content than by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy sleepy result while a good number of the opposite stock do the opposite. For a grower the percentage is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is close to useless without the terpene notes.
